
Class 

Book. 







/ u 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSiT. 



BY 

ARTHUR G. BENSON 

FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE 
CAMBRIDGE 

THE UPTON LETTERS 

FROM A COLLEGE 
WINDOW 

BESIDE STILL WATERS 

THE ALTAR FIRE 

THE SCHOOLMASTER 

AT LARGE 

THE SILENT ISLE 

JOHN RUSKIN 

LEAVES OF THE TREE 

CHILD OF THE DAWN 

PAUL THE MINSTREL 

THY ROD AND THY 
STAFF 

ALONG THE ROAD 

JOYOUS GARD 

WATERSPRINGS 

WHERE NO FEAR WAS 



WHERE 
NO FEAR WAS 



BY 

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 

FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Gbe Ifmicfcerbocfcer ipress 
1914 



.s"»i« 



^Vv- 



>c\ x 



Copyright, 1914 

BY 

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 



MAY 20 1914 

Ube Ikntcfcerbocfeer jpress, 1Rew Korli 

©CI.A37J !>40 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Shadow i 

II. Shapes of Fear ... 8 

III. The Darkest Doubt . . 15 

IV. Vulnerability ... 20 

V. The Use of Fear ... 30 

VI. Fears of Childhood . . 39 

VII. Fears of Boyhood . -55 

VIII. Fears of Youth . .71 

IX. Fears of Middle Age . .81 

X. Fears of Age ... 93 

XI. Dr. Johnson . . . .112 

XII. Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle . 126 

XIII. Charlotte Bronte . .148 

XIV. John Sterling . . .165 

iii 



CHAPTER 






PAGE 


XV. 


Instinctive 


Fear . 


• 173 


XVI. 


Fear of Life 


. 190 


XVII. 


Simplicity 


• 


. 208 


XVIII. 


Affection 


• 


. 218 


XIX. 


Sin 


• 


. 228 


XX. 


Serenity 


• • 


. 240 



" Thus they went on till they came to about the 
middle of the Valley, and then Christiana said, 
1 Methinks I see something yonder on the road before 
us, a thing of such a shape such as I have not seen. ' 
Then said Joseph, ' Mother, what is it?' 'An ugly 
thing, Child, an ugly thing, ' said she. * But, Mother, 
what is it like? ' said he. "Tis like I cannot tell 
what,' said she. And now it was but a little way 
off. Then said she, ' It is nigh.' " 

"Pilgrim's Progress," Part II. 



Where No Fear Was 



THE SHADOW 

There surely may come a time for each of 
us, if we have lived with any animation or 
interest, if we have had any constant or even 
fitful desire to penetrate and grasp the 
significance of the strange adventure of life, 
a time, I say, when we may look back a little, 
not sentimentally or with any hope of making 
out an impressive case for ourselves, and 
interrogate the memory as to what have 
been the most real, vivid, and intense things 
that have befallen us by the way. We may 
try to separate the momentous from the 
trivial, and the important from the unim- 
portant ; to discern where and how and when 



2 Where No Fear Was 

we might have acted differently; to see and 
to say what has really mattered, what has 
made a deep mark on our spirit; what has 
hampered or wounded or maimed us. Be- 
cause one of the strangest things about life 
seems to be our incapacity to decide before- 
hand, or even at the time, where the real 
and fruitful joys, and where the dark dangers 
and distresses lay. The things that at cer- 
tain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope 
and aim, seemed so infinitely desirable, so 
necessary to happiness, have faded, many 
of them, into the lightest and most worthless 
of husks and phantoms, like the withered 
flowers that we find sometimes shut in the 
pages of our old books, and cannot even 
remember of what glowing and emotional 
moment they were the record! 

How impossible it is ever to learn anything 
by being told it ! How necessary it is to pay 
the full price for any knowledge worth having ! 
The anxious father, the tearful mother, may 
warn the little boy before he goes to school 
of the dangers that await him. He does not 



The Shadow 3 

understand, he does not attend, he is looking 
at the pattern of the carpet, and wondering 
for the hundredth time whether the oddly- 
shaped blue thing which appears and re- 
appears at intervals is a bird or a flower — 
yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched 
on a bough! He wishes the talk were over, 
he looks at the little scar on his father's hand, 
and remembers that he has been told that 
he cut it in a cucumber-frame when he was 
a boy. And then, long afterwards perhaps, 
when he has made a mistake and is suffering 
for it, he sees that it was that of which they 
spoke, and wonders that they could not 
have explained it better. 

And this is so all along! We. cannot 
recognise the dark tower, to which in the 
story Childe Roland came, by any descrip- 
tion. We must go there ourselves; and not 
till we feel the teeth of the trap biting into 
us do we see that it was exactly in such a 
place that we had been warned that it would 
be laid. 

There is an episode in that strange and 



4 Where No Fear Was 

beautiful book Phantasies, by George Mac- 
donald, which comes often to my mind. The 
boy is wandering in the enchanted forest, 
and he is told to avoid the house where the 
Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose 
young guide shows him where the paths 
divide, and he takes the one indicated to 
him with a sense of misgiving. 

A little while before he had been deceived 
by the Alder-maiden, and had given her his 
love in error. This has taken some of the 
old joy out of his heart, but he has made his 
escape from her, and thinks he has learned 
his lesson. 

But he comes at last to the long low house 
in the clearing; he finds within it an ancient 
woman reading out of an old volume; he 
enters, he examines the room in which she 
sits, and yielding to curiosity, he opens the 
door of the great cupboard in the corner, 
in spite of a muttered warning. He thinks, 
on first opening it, that it is just a dark cup- 
board; but he sees with a shock of surprise 
that he is looking into a long dark passage, 



The Shadow 5 

which leads out, far away from where he 
stands, into the starlit night. Then a 
figure, which seems to have been running 
from a long distance, turns the corner, and 
comes speeding down towards him. He has 
not time to close the door, but stands aside 
to let it pass ; it passes, and slips behind him ; 
and soon he sees that it is a shadow of him- 
self, which has fallen on the floor at his feet. 
He asks what has happened, and then the 
old woman says that he has found his shadow, 
a thing which happens to many people; and 
then, for the first time, she raises her head 
and looks at him, and he sees that her mouth 
is full of long white teeth ; he knows where he 
is at last, and stumbles out, with the dark 
shadow at his heels, which is to haunt him 
so miserably for many a sad day. 

That is a very fine and true similitude of 
v/hat befalls many men and women. They 
go astray, they give up some precious thing 
— their innocence perhaps — to a deluding 
temptation. They are delivered for a time; 
and then, a little while after, they find their 



6 Where No Fear Was 

shadow, which no tears or anguish of regret 
can take away, till the healing of life and work 
and purpose annuls it. Neither is it always 
annulled, even in length of days. 

But it is a paltry and inglorious mistake to 
let the shadow have its disheartening will of 
us. It is only a shadow, after all ! And if we 
capitulate after our first disastrous encounter, 
it does not mean that we shall be for ever 
vanquished, though it means perhaps a long 
and dreary waste of shame-stained days. ; 
That is what we must try to avoid — any ; 
waste of time and strength. For if anything 
is certain, it is that we have all to fight until 
we conquer, and the sooner we take up the 
dropped sword again the better. 

And we have also to learn that no one 
can help us except ourselves. Other people 
can sympathise and console, try to soothe 
our injured vanity, try to persuade us that 
the dangers and disasters ahead are not so 
dreadful as they appear to be, and that the 
mistakes we have made are not irreparable. 
But no one can remove danger or regret from 



The Shadow 7 

us, or relieve us of the necessity of facing our 
own troubles; the most that they can do, 
indeed, is to encourage us to try again. 

But we cannot hope to change the condi- 
tions of life; and one of its conditions is, as I 
have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. 
No matter how vividly they are described to 
us, no matter how eagerly those who love us 
try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. 
For that is the essence of life — experience; 
and though we cannot rejoice when we are 
in the grip of it, and when we cannot see 
what the end will be, we can at least say to 
ourselves again and again, "This is at all 
events reality — this is business!" for it is the 
moments of endurance and energy and action 
which after all justify us in living, and not 
the pleasant spaces where we saunter among 
flowers and sunlit woods. Those are con- 
ceded to us, to tempt us to live, to make us 
desire to remain in the world; and we need 
not be afraid to take them, to use them, to 
enjoy them; because all things alike help to 
make us what we are. 



II 

SHAPES OF FEAR 

Now as I look back a little, I see that some 
of my worst experiences have not hurt or 
injured me at all. I do not claim more than 
my share of troubles, but "I have had 
trouble enough for one, " as Browning says, — 
bereavements, disappointments, the illness 
of those I have loved, illness of my 
own, quarrels, misunderstandings, enmities, 
angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made 
bad mistakes, I have failed in my duty, I 
have done many things that I regret, I 
have been unreasonable, unkind, selfish. 
Many of these things have hurt and wounded 
me, have brought me into sorrow, and even 
into despair. But I do not feel that any of 
them have really injured me, and some of 
them have already benefited me. I have 

8 



Shapes of Fear 9 

learned to be a little more patient and 
diligent, and I have discovered that there 
are certain things that I must at all costs 
avoid. 

But there is one thing which seems to me 
to have always and invariably hampered and 
maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it, 
and I have often yielded to it; and that is 
Fear. It can be called by many names, 
and all of them ugly names — anxiety, timid- 
ity, moral cowardice. I can never trace 
the smallest good in having given way to 
it. It has been from my earliest days the 
Shadow; and I think it is the shadow in the 
lives of many men and women. I want in 
this book to track it, if I can, to its lair, to 
see what it is, where its awful power lies, 
and what, if anything, one can do to resist 
it. It seems the most unreal thing in the 
world, when one is on the other side of it ; and 
yet face to face with it, it has a strength, a 
poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes 
it seem like a personal and specific ill-will, 
issuing in a sort of dreadful enchantment or 



io Where No Fear Was 

spell, which renders it impossible to with- 
stand. Yet, strange to say, it has not ex- 
ercised its power in the few occasions in my 
life when it would seem to have been really 
justified. Let me quote an instance or two 
which will illustrate what I mean. 

I was confronted once with the necessity of 
a small surgical operation, quite unexpect- 
edly. If I had known beforehand that it 
was to be done, I should have depicted every 
incident with horror and misery. But the 
moment arrived, and I found myself march- 
ing to my bedroom with a surgeon and a 
nurse, with a sense almost of amusement 
at the adventure. 

I was called upon once in Switzerland to. 
assist with two guides in the rescue of an 
unfortunate woman who had fallen from a 
precipice, and had to be brought down, dead 
or alive. We hurried up through the pine- 
forest with a chair, and found the poor crea- 
ture alive indeed, but with horrible injuries — 
an eye knocked out, an arm and a thigh 
broken, her ulster torn to ribbons, and with 



Shapes of Fear n 

more blood about the place in pools than I 
should have thought a human body could 
contain. She was conscious; she had to be 
lifted into the chair, and we had to discover 
where she belonged; she fainted away in the 
middle of it, and I had to go on and break the 
news to her relations. If I had been told 
beforehand what would have to be done, I 
do not think I could have faced it; but it 
was there to do, and I found myself entirely 
capable of taking part, and even of wondering 
all the time that it was possible to act. 

Again, I was once engulfed in a crevasse, 
hanging from the ice-ledge with a portentous 
gulf below, and a glacier-stream roaring in 
the darkness. I could get no hold for foot 
or hand, my companions could not reach me 
or extract me ; and as I sank into unconscious- 
ness, hearing my own expiring breath, I 
knew that I was doomed; but I can only say, 
quite honestly and humbly, that I had no 
fear at all, and only dimly wondered what 
arrangements would be made at Eton, where 
I was then a master, to accommodate the 



12 Where No Fear Was 

boys of my house and my pupils. It was not 
done by an effort, nor did I brace myself to 
the situation: fear simply did not come near 
to me. 

Once again, I found myself confronted, not 
so long ago, with an incredibly painful and 
distressing interview. That indeed did op- 
press me with almost intolerable dread before- 
hand. I was to go to a certain house in 
London, and there was just a chance that 
the interview might not take place after all. 
As I drove there, I suddenly found myself 
wondering whether the interview could really 
be going to take place — how often had I re- 
hearsed it beforehand with anguish — and 
then as suddenly became aware that I should, 
in some strange way, be disappointed if it 
did not take place. I wanted on the whole 
to go through with it, and to see what it 
would be like. A deep-seated curiosity came 
to my aid. It did take place, and it was very 
bad — worse than I could have imagined ; but 
it was not terrible! 

These are just four instances which come 



Shapes of Fear 13 

into my mind. I should be glad to feel that 
the courage which undoubtedly came had 
been the creation of my will; but it was not 
so. In three cases, the events came unexpect- 
edly ; but in the fourth case I had long antici- 
pated the moment with extreme dread. Yet 
in that last case the fear suddenly slipped 
away, without the smallest effort on my part ; 
and in all four cases some strange gusto of 
experience, some sense of heightened life 
and adventure, rose in the mind like a foun- 
tain — so that, even in the crevasse, I said to 
myself, not excitedly but serenely, "So this 
is what it feels like to await death!" 

It was this particular experience which 
gave me an inkling into that which in so 
many tragic histories seems incredible — 
that men often do pass to death, by scaffold 
and by stake, at the last moment, in serenity 
and even in joy. I do not doubt for a 
moment that it is the immortal principle in 
man, the sense of deathlessness, which comes 
to his aid. It is the instinct which, in spite of 
all knowledge and experience, says suddenly, 



14 Where No Fear Was 

in a moment like that, "Well, what then?" 
That instinct is a far truer thing than any 
expectation or imagination. It sees things, 
in supreme moments, in a true proportion. 
It asserts that when the rope jerks, or the 
flames leap up, or the benumbing blow falls, 
there is something there which cannot pos- 
sibly be injured, and which indeed is rather 
freed from the body of our humiliation. It 
is but an incident, after all, in a much longer 
and more momentous voyage. It means 
only the closing of one chapter of experience 
and the beginning of another. The base 
element in it is the fear which dreads the 
opening of the door, and the quitting of what 
is familiar. And I feel assured of this, that 
the one universal and inevitable experience, 
known to us as death, must in reality be a 
very simple and even a natural affair, and 
that when we can look back upon it, it will 
seem to us amazing that we can ever have 
regarded it as so momentous and appalling a 
thing. 



Ill 



THE DARKEST DOUBT 



Now we can make no real advance in the 
things of the spirit until we have seen what 
lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot 
help us to grow, at best it can only teach 
us to be prudent ; it does not of itself destroy 
the desire to offend — only shame can do 
that ; if our wish to be different comes merely 
from our being afraid to transgress, then, if 
the fear of punishment were to be removed, 
we should go back with a light heart to our 
old sins. We may obey irresponsible power, 
because we know that it can hurt us if we 
disobey; but unless we can perceive the 
reason why this and that is forbidden, we can- 
not concur with law. We learn as children 
that flame has power to hurt us, but we only 
dread the fire because it can injure us, not 

15 



1 6 Where No Fear Was 

because we admire the reason which it has 
for burning. So long as we do not sin simply 
because we know the laws of life which punish 
sin, we have not learned any hatred of sin ; it 
is only because we hate the punishment more 
than we love the sin, that we abstain. 

Socrates once said, in one of his wise par- 
adoxes, that it was better to sin knowingly 
than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, 
but it means that at least if we sin know- 
ingly, there is some purpose, some courage in 
the soul. We take a risk with our eyes open, 
and our purpose may perhaps be changed; 
whereas if we sin ignorantly, we do so out of a 
mere base instinct, and there is no purpose 
that may be educated. Anyone who has 
ever had the task of teaching boys or young 
men to write will know how much easier it is 
to teach those who write volubly and exuber- 
antly, and desire to express themselves, even 
if they do it with many faults and lapses of 
taste; taste and method may be corrected, 
if only the instinct of expression is there. 
But the young man who has no impulse to 



The Darkest Doubt 17 

write, who says that he could think of no- 
thing to say, it is impossible to teach him 
much, because one cannot communicate the 
desire for expression. 

And the same holds good of life. Those 
who have strong vital impulses can learn 
restraint and choice ; but the people who have 
no particular impulses and preferences, who 
just live out of mere impetus and habit, who 
plod along, doing in a dispirited way just 
what they find to do, and lapsing into indo- 
lence and indifference the moment that 
prescribed work ceases, those are the spirits 
that afford the real problem, because they 
despise activity, and think energy a mere 
exhibition of fussy diffuseness. 

But the generous, eager, wilful nature, 
who has always some aim in sight, who 
makes mistakes perhaps, gives offence, col- 
lides high-heartedly with others, makes both 
friends and enemies, loves and hates, is 
anxious, jealous, self-absorbed, resentful, 
intolerant — there is always hope for such 
an one, for he is quick to despair, capable of 



18 Where No Fear Was 

shame, swift to repent, and even when he is 
worsted and wounded, rises to fight again. 
Such a nature, through pain and love, can 
learn to chasten his base desires, and to 
choose the nobler and worthier way. 

But what does really differentiate men 
and women is not their power of fearing 
and suffering, but their power of caring and 
admiring. The only real and vital force 
in the world is the force which attracts, the 
beauty which is so desirable that one must 
imitate it if one can, the wisdom which 
is so calm and serene that one must possess 
it if one may. 

And thus all depends upon our discerning 
in the world a loving intention of some kind, 
which holds us in view, and draws us to 
itself. If we merely think of God and 
nature as an inflexible system of laws, and 
that our only chance of happiness is to slip 
in and out of them, as a man might pick 
his way among red-hot ploughshares, thank- 
ful if he can escape burning, then we can 
make no sort of advance, because we can have 



The Darkest Doubt 19 

neither faith nor trust. The thing from 
which one merely flees can have no real 
power over our spirit; but if we know God 
as a fatherly Heart behind nature, who is 
leading us on our way, then indeed we can 
walk joyfully in happiness, and undismayed 
in trouble; because troubles then become 
only the wearisome incidents of the upward 
ascent, the fatigue, the failing breath, the 
strained muscles, the discomfort which is 
actually taking us higher, and cannot by 
any means be avoided. 

But fear is the opposite of all this ; it is the 
dread of the unknown, the ghastly doubt as 
to whether there is any goal before us or not ; 
when we fear, we are like the butterfly that 
flutters anxiously away from the boy who 
pursues it, who means out of mere wanton- 
ness to strike it down tattered and bruised 
among the grass-stems. 



IV 

VULNERABILITY 

There have been many attempts in the 
history of mankind to escape from the do- 
minion of fear ; the essence of fear, that which 
prompts it, is the consciousness of our vul- 
nerability. What we all dread is the disease 
or the accident that may disable us, the loss 
of money or credit, the death of those whom 
we love and whose love makes the sunshine 
of our life, the anger and hostility and dis- 
pleasure and scorn and ill-usage of those about 
us. These are the definite things which the 
anxious mind forecasts, and upon which it 
mournfully dwells. 

The object then in the minds of the philo- 
sophers or teachers who would fain relieve 
the unhappiness of the world, has always been 
to suggest ways in which this vulnerability 

20 



Vulnerability 21 

may be lessened; and thus their object has 
been to disengage as far as possible the hopes 
and affections of men from things which must 
always be fleeting. That is the principle 
which lies behind all asceticism, that, if one 
can be indifferent to wealth and comfort and 
popularity, one has a better chance of seren- 
ity. The essence of that teaching is not 
that pleasant things are not desirable, but 
that one is more miserable if one loses them 
than if one never cares for them at all. The 
ascetic trains himself to be indifferent about 
food and drink and the apparatus of life; he 
aims at celibacy partly because love itself is 
an overmastering passion, and partly because 
he cannot bear to engage himself with human 
affections, the loss of which may give him 
pain. There is, of course, a deeper strain 
in asceticism than this, which is a suspicious 
mistrust of all physical joys and a sense of 
their baseness ; but that is in itself an artistic 
preference of mental and spiritual joys, and 
a defiance to everything which may impair or 
invade them. 



22 Where No Fear Was 

The Stoic imperturbability is an attempt 
to take a further step; not to fly from life, 
but to mingle with it, and yet to grow to 
be not dependent on it. The Stoic ideal 
was a high one, to cultivate a firmness of 
mind that was on the one hand not to be 
dismayed by pain or suffering, and on the 
other to use life so temperately and judi- 
ciously as not to form habits of indulgence 
which it would be painful to discontinue. 
The weakness of Stoicism was that it de- 
spised human relations; and the strength 
of primitive Christianity was that while it 
recommended a Stoical simplicity of life, it 
taught men not to be afraid of love, but to 
use and lavish love freely, as being the one 
thing which would survive death and not 
be cut short by it. The Christian teaching 
came to this, that the world was meant to be 
a school of love, and that love was to be an 
outward-rippling ring of affection extending 
from the family outwards to the tribe, the 
nation, the world, and on to God Himself. It 
laid all its emphasis on the truth that love is 



Vulnerability 23 

the one immortal thing, that all the joys and 
triumphs of the world pass away with the 
decay of its material framework, but that 
love passes boldly on, with linked hands, 
into the darkness of the unknown. 

The one loss that Christianity recognised 
was the loss of love; the one punishment it 
dreaded was the withholding of love. 

As Christianity soaked into the world, it 
became vitiated, and drew into itself many 
elements of human weakness. It became a 
social force, it learned to depend on property, 
it fulminated a code of criminality, and 
accepted human standards of prosperity and 
wealth. It lost its simplicity and became 
sophisticated. It is hard to say that men of 
the world should not, if they wish, claim to 
be Christians, but the whole essence of Christ- 
ianity is obscured if it is forgotten that its 
vital attributes are its indifference to mate- 
rial conveniences, and its emphatic accept- 
ance of sympathy as the one supreme virtue. 

This is but another way of expressing that 
our troubles and our terrors alike are based 



24 Where No Fear Was 

on selfishness, and that if we are really con- 
cerned with the welfare of others we shall not 
be much concerned with our own. 

The difficulty in adopting the Christian 
theory is that God does not apparently intend 
to cure the world by creating all men unself- 
ish. People are born selfish, and the laws 
of nature and heredity seem to ordain that 
it shall be so. Indeed a certain selfishness 
seems to be inseparable from any desire to 
live. The force of asceticism and of Stoic- 
ism is that they both appeal to selfishness as 
a motive. They frankly say, "Happiness is 
your aim, personal happiness; but instead of 
grasping at pleasure whenever it offers, you 
will find it more prudent in the end not to 
care too much about such things." It is 
true that popular Christianity makes the 
same sort of appeal. It says, or seems to 
say, "If you grasp at happiness in this world, 
you may secure a great deal of it success- 
fully ; but it will be worse for you eventually. " 

The theory of life as taught and enforced, 
for instance, in such a work as Dante's great 



Vulnerability 25 

poem is based upon this crudity of thought. 
Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, ex- 
pressed plainly that the chief motive of man 
to practise morality must be his fear of ulti- 
mate punishment. His was an attempt to 
draw away the curtain which hides this world 
from the next, and to horrify men into living 
purely and kindly. But the mind only re- 
volts against the dastardly injustice of a 
God who allows men to be born into the 
world so corrupt, with so many incentives to 
sin, and deliberately hides from them the 
ghastly sight of the eternal torments, which 
might have saved them from recklessness of 
life. No one who had trod the dark caverns 
of Hell or the flinty ridges of Purgatory, as 
Dante represented himself doing, who had 
seen the awful sights and heard the heart- 
broken words of the place, could have re- 
turned to the world as a light-hearted sinner ! 
Whatever we may believe of God, we must not 
for an instant allow ourselves to believe that 
life can be so brief and finite, so small and 
hampered an opportunity, and that punish- 



26 Where No Fear Was 

ment could be so demoniacal and so infinite. 
A God who could design such a scheme must 
be essentially evil and malignant. We may 
menace wicked men with punishment for 
wanton misdeeds, but it must be with just 
punishment. What could we say of a human 
father who exposed a child to temptation 
without explaining the consequences, and 
then condemned him to lifelong penalties 
for failing to make the right choice? We 
must firmly believe that if offences are 
finite, punishment must be finite too; that 
it must be remedial and not mechanical. 
We must believe that if we deserve pun- 
ishment, it will be because we can hope 
for restoration. Hell is a monstrous and 
insupportable fiction, and the idea of it 
is simply inconsistent with any belief in 
the goodness of God. It is easy to quote 
texts to support it, but we must not allow 
any text, any record in the world, however 
sacred, to shatter our belief in the Love 
and Justice of God. And I say as frankly 
and directly as I can that until we can 



Vulnerability 27 

get rid of this intolerable terror, we can 
make no advance at all. 

The old, fierce Saints, who went into the 
darkness exulting in the thought of the 
eternal damnation of the wicked, had not 
spelt the first letter of the Christian creed, 
and I doubt not have discovered their mis- 
take long ago! Yet there are pious people 
in the world who will neither think nor speak 
frankly of the subject, for fear of weakening 
the motives for human virtue. I will at least 
speak frankly, and though I believe with all 
my heart in a life beyond the grave, in which 
suffering enough may exist for the cure of 
those who by wilful sin have sunk into sloth 
and hopelessness and despair, and even into 
cruelty and brutality, I do not for an instant 
believe that the conduct of the vilest human 
being who ever set foot on the earth can de- 
serve more than a term of punishment, or 
that such punishment will have anything 
that is vindictive about it. 

It may be said that I am here only com- 
bating an old-fashioned idea, and that no one 



28 Where No Fear Was 

believes in the old theory of eternal punish- 
ment, or that if they believe that the possi- 
bility exists, they do not believe that any 
human being can incur it. But I feel little 
doubt that the belief does exist, and that it is 
more widespread than one cares to believe. 
To believe it is to yield to the darkest and 
basest temptation of fear, and keeps all who 
hold it back from the truth of God. 

What then are we to believe about the 
punishment of our sins? I look back upon 
my own life, and I see numberless occasions — 
they rise up before me, a long perspective of 
failures — when I have acted cruelly, self- 
ishly, self -indulgently, basely, knowing per- 
fectly well that I was so behaving. What 
was wrong with me? Why did I so behave? 
Because I preferred the baser course, and 
thought at the time that it gave me pleasure. 

Well then, what do I wish about all that? 
I wish it had not happened so, I wish I had 
been kinder, more just, more self -restrained, 
more strong. I am ashamed, because I con- 
demn myself, and because I know that those 



Vulnerability 29 

whom I love and honour would condemn me, 
if they knew all. But I do not, therefore, lose 
all hope of myself, nor do I think that God 
will not show me how to be different. If it 
can only be done by suffering, I dread the 
suffering, but I am ready to suffer if I can 
become what I should wish to be. But I do 
not for a moment think that God will cast 
me off or turn His face away from me because 
I have sinned; and I can pray that He will 
lead me into light and strength. 

And thus it is not my vulnerability that I 
dread; I rather welcome it as a sign that I 
may learn the truth so. And I will not look 
upon my desire for pleasant things as a proof 
that I am evil, but rather as a proof that God 
is showing me where happiness lies, and 
teaching me by my mistakes to discern and 
value it. He could make me perfect if He 
would, in a single instant. But the fact that 
He does not, is a sign that He has something 
better in store for me than a mere mechanical 
perfection. 



V 

THE USE OF FEAR 

The advantages of the fearful temperament, 
if it is not a mere unmanning and desolating 
dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is the 
shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, 
the inventive temperament, but it multi- 
plies resource and invention a hundredfold. 
Everyone knows the superstition which is 
deeply rooted in humanity, that a time of 
exaltation and excitement and unusual suc- 
cess is held to be often the prelude to some 
disaster, just as the sense of excitement and 
buoyant health, when it is very consciously 
perceived, is thought to herald the approach 
of illness. "I felt so happy," people say, 
"that I was sure that some misfortune was 
going to befall me — it is not lucky to feel 

so secure as that!" This represented itself 

30 



The Use of Fear 31 

to the Greeks as part of the divine govern- 
ment of the world; they thought that the 
heedless and self-confident man was beguiled 
by success into what they called ufptq, the 
insolence of prosperity; and that then fc-q, 
that is, disaster, followed. They believed 
that the over-prosperous man incurred the 
envy and jealousy of the gods. We see this 
in the old legend of Polycrates of Samos, 
whose schemes all succeeded, and whose 
ventures all turned out well. He consulted 
a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, 
who advised him to inflict some deliberate 
loss or sacrifice upon himself; so Polycrates 
drew from his finger and flung into the sea a 
signet-ring which he possessed, with a jewel 
of great rarity and beauty in it. Soon after- 
wards a fish was caught by the royal fisher- 
man, and was served up at the king's table 
— there, inside the body of the fish, was the 
ring; and when Polycrates saw that, he felt 
that the gods had restored him his gift, and 
that his destruction was determined upon; 
which came true, for he was caught by 



32 Where No Fear Was 

pirates at sea, and crucified upon a rocky- 
headland. 

No nation, and least of all the Greeks, 
would have arrived at this theory of life and 
fate, if they had not felt that it was sup- 
ported by actual instances. It was of the 
nature of an inference from the facts of life; 
and the explanation undoubtedly is that men 
do get betrayed, by a constant experience of 
good fortune, into rashness and heedless- 
ness, because they trust to their luck and 
depend upon their fortunate star. 

But the man who is of an energetic and 
active type, if he is haunted by anxiety, if 
his imagination paints the possibilities of 
disaster, takes every means in his power to 
foresee contingencies, and to deal cautiously 
and thoroughly with the situation which 
causes him anxiety. If he is a man of keen 
sensibilities, the pressure of such care is so 
insupportable that he takes prompt and 
effective measures to remove it; and his fear 
thus becomes an element in his success, 
because it urges him to action, and at the 



The Use of Fear 33 

same time teaches him the need of due 
precaution. As Horace wrote: 

Sperat infestis, metuit secundis 
Alteram sortem. 

"He hopes for a change of fortune when 
things are menacing, he fears a reverse when 
things are prosperous." And if we look at 
the facts of life, we see that it is not by any 
means the confident and optimistic people 
who succeed best in their designs. It is rather 
the man of eager and ambitious tempera- 
ment, who dreads a repulse and anticipates it, 
and takes all possible measures beforehand 
to avoid it. 

We see the same principle underlying 
the scientific doctrine of evolution. People 
often think loosely that the idea of evolution, 
in the case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, 
with his immobility, his long legs, his pointed 
beak, his muscular neck, is that such char- 
acteristics have been evolved through long 
ages by birds that have had to get their 
food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were 
3 



34 Where No Fear Was 

thus gradually equipped for food-getting 
through long ages of practice. But of course 
no particular bird is thus modified by cir* 
cumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen 
would not develop the characteristics of 
the heron; it would simply die for lack of 
food. It is rather that certain minute varia- 
tions take place, for unknown reasons, in 
every species; and the bird which happened 
to be hatched out in a fenland with a rather 
sharper beak or rather longer legs than his 
fellows, would have his power of obtaining 
food slightly increased, and would thus be 
more likely to perpetuate in his offspring 
that particular advantage of form. This 
principle working through endless centuries 
would tend slowly to develop the stock that 
was better equipped for life under such cir- 
cumstances, and to eliminate those less 
suited to the locality; and thus the fittest 
would tend to survive. But it does not 
indicate any design on the part of the birds 
themselves, nor any deliberate attempt to 
develop those characteristics; it is rather 



The Use of Fear 35 

that such characteristics, once started by 
natural variation, tend to emphasise them- 
selves in the lapse of time. 

No doubt fear has played an enormous 
part in the progress of the human race itself. 
The savage whose imagination was stronger 
than that of other savages, and who could 
forecast the possibilities of disaster, would 
wander through the forest with more pre- 
caution against wild beasts, and would make 
his dwelling more secure against assault; so 
that the more timid and imaginative type 
would tend to survive longest and to multiply 
their stock. Man in his physical character- 
istics is a very weak, frail, and helpless ani- 
mal, exposed to all kinds of dangers; his 
infancy is protracted and singularly defence- 
less; his pace is slow, his strength is insigni- 
ficant ; it is his imagination that has put him 
at the top of creation, and has enabled him 
both to evade dangers and to use natural 
forces for his greater security. Though he is 
the youngest of all created forms, and by no 
means the best equipped for life, he has been 



36 Where No Fear Was 

able to go ahead in a way denied to all 
other animals; his inventiveness has been 
largely developed by his terrors; and the 
result has been that whereas all other animals 
still preserve, as a condition of life, their 
ceaseless attitude of suspicion and fear, 
man has been enabled by organisation to 
establish communities in which fear of dis- 
aster plays but little part. If one watches 
a bird feeding on a lawn, it is strange to 
observe its ceaseless vigilance. It takes 
a hurried mouthful, and then looks round 
in an agitated manner to see that it is in no 
danger of attack. Yet it is clear that the 
terror in which all wild animals seem to live, 
and without which self-preservation would 
be impossible, does not in the least militate 
against their physical welfare. A man who 
had to live his life under the same sort of risks 
that a bird in a garden has to endure from 
cats and other foes, would lose his senses from 
the awful pressure of terror; he would lie 
under the constant shadow of assassination. 
But the singular thing in Nature is that she 



The Use of Fear 37 

preserves characteristics long after they have 
ceased to be needed; and so, though a man 
in a civilised community has very little to 
dread, he is still haunted by an irrational 
sense of insecurity and precariousness. And 
thus many of our fears arise from old inherit- 
ance, and represent nothing rational or real 
at all, but only an old and savage need of 
vigilance and wariness. 

One can see this exemplified in a curious 
way in level tracts of country. Everyone 
who has traversed places like the plain of 
Worcestershire must remember the irritat- 
ing way in which the roads keep ascending 
little eminences, instead of going round at 
the foot. Now these old country roads no 
doubt represent very ancient tracks indeed, 
dating from times when much of the land was 
uncultivated. They get stereotyped, partly be- 
cause they were tracks, and partly because for 
convenience the first enclosures and tillages 
were made along the roads for purposes of com- 
munication. But the perpetual tendency to 
ascend little eminences no doubt dates from 



38 Where No Fear Was 

a time when it was safer to go up, in order to 
look round and to see ahead, partly in order 
to be sure of one's direction, and partly to 
b 3 ware of the manifold dangers of the road. 

And thus many of the fears by which one 
is haunted are these old survivals, these in- 
herited anxieties. Who does not know the 
frame of mind when, perhaps for a day, per- 
haps for days together, the mind is oppressed 
and uneasy, scenting danger in the air, fore- 
casting calamity, recounting all the possible 
directions in which fate or malice may have 
power to wound and hurt us? It is a melan- 
choly inheritance, but it cannot be combated 
by any reason. It is of no use then to imitate 
Robinson Crusoe, and to make a list of one's 
blessings on a piece of paper; that only 
increases our fear, because it is just the 
chance of forfeiting such blessings of which 
we are in dread! We must simply remind 
ourselves that we are surrounded by old 
phantoms, and that we derive our weakness 
from ages far back, in which risks were many 
and security was rare. 



VI 

FEARS OF CHILDHOOD 

If I look back over my own life, I can dis- 
cern three distinct stages of fear and anxi- 
eties, and I expect it is the same with most 
people. The terrors of childhood are very 
mysterious things, and their horror consists 
in the child's inability to put the dread into 
words. I remember how one night, when we 
were living in the Master's Lodge at Welling- 
ton College, I had gone to bed, and waking 
soon afterwards heard a voice somewhere 
outside. I got out of bed, went to the door, 
and looked out. Close to my door was an 
archway which looked into the open gallery 
that ran round the big front hall, giving 
access to the bedrooms. At the opposite end 
of the hall, in the gallery, burnt a gaslight ; to 
my horror, I observed close to the gas what 

39 



40 Where No Fear Was 

seemed to me a colossal shrouded statue, 
made of a black bronze, formless, silent, 
awful. I crept back to my bed, and there 
shivered in an ecstasy of fear, till at last I fell 
asleep. There was no statue there in the 
morning ! I told my old nurse, after a day or 
two of dumb dread, what I had seen. She 
laughed, and told me that a certain Mrs. 
Holder, an elderly widow who was a dress- 
maker, had been to see her, about some piece 
of work. They had turned out the nursery 
lights and were going downstairs, when 
some question arose about the stuff of the 
frock, whatever it was. Mrs. Holder had 
mounted on a chair to look close at the stuff 
by the gaslight; and this was my bogy! 

We had a delightful custom in nursery 
days, devised by my mother, that on festival 
occasions, such as birthdays or at Christmas, 
our presents were given us in the evening by a 
fairy called Abracadabra. 

The first time the fairy appeared, we heard, 
after tea, in the hall, the hoarse notes of a 
horn. We rushed out in amazement. Down 



Fears of Childhood 41 

in the hall, talking to an aunt of mine who 
was staying in the house, stood a veritable 
fairy, in a scarlet dress, carrying a wand and 
a scarlet bag, and wearing a high pointed 
scarlet hat, of the shape of an extinguisher. 
My aunt called us down; and we saw that 
the fairy had the face of a great ape, dark- 
brown, spectacled, of a good-natured aspect, 
with a broad grin, and a curious crop of white 
hair, hanging down behind and on each side. 
Unfortunately, my eldest brother, a very 
clever and imaginative child, was seized with 
a panic so insupportable at the sight of the 
face, that his present had to be given him 
hurriedly, and he was led away, blanched 
and shuddering, to the nursery. After that, 
the fairy never appeared except when he was 
at school ; but long after, when I was looking 
in a lumber-room with my brother for some 
mislaid toys, I found in a box the mask of 
Abracadabra and the horn. I put it hurried- 
ly on, and blew a blast on the horn, which 
seemed to be of tortoise-shell with metal 
fittings. To my amazement, he turned per- 



42 Where No Fear Was 

fectly white, covered his face with his hands, 
and burst out with the most dreadful moans. 
I thought at first that he was making be- 
lieve to be frightened, but I saw in a minute 
or two that he had quite lost control of him- 
self, and the things were hurriedly put away. 
At the time, I thought it a silly kind of affec- 
tation. But I perceive now that he had had 
a real shock the first time he had seen the 
mask; and though he was then a big school- 
boy, the terror was indelible. Who can say 
of what old inheritance of fear that horror 
of the great ape-like countenance was the 
sign? He had no associations of fear with 
apes, but it must have been, I think, some 
dim old primeval terror, dating from some 
ancestral encounter with a forest monster. 
In no other way can I explain it. 

Again, as a child, I was once sitting at 
dinner with my parents, reading an old 
bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the 
pictures, and waiting for dessert. I turned a 
page, and saw a picture of a Saint, lying 
on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge 



Fears of Childhood 43 

and cloudy fiend with vast bat-like wings 
bending over him, preparing to clutch him, 
but deterred by the sacred emblem. That 
was a really terrible shock. I turned the 
page hastily, and said nothing, though it 
deprived me of speech and appetite. My 
father noticed my distress, and asked if I 
felt sick, but I said, "No." I got through 
dessert somehow; but then I had to say 
good-night, go out into the dimly-lit hall, 
slip the volume back into the bookcase, and 
get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feel- 
ing the air full of wings and clutching hands. 
That was too bad ever to be spoken of; and 
as I did not remember which volume it was, 
I was never able to look at the set of maga- 
zines again for fear of encountering it ; and, 
strange to say, some years afterwards, when 
I was an Eton boy, I looked curiously for 
the picture, and again experienced the same 
overwhelming horror. 

My youngest brother, too, an imagina- 
tive child, could never be persuaded by any 
bribes or entreaties to go into a dark room to 



44 Where No Fear Was 

fetch anything out. Nothing would induce 
him. I remember that he was catechised 
at the tea-table as to what he expected to 
find, to which he replied at once, with a 
horror-stricken look and a long stammer, 
1 ' B — b — b — bloodstained corpses ! ' ' 

It seems fantastic and ridiculous enough to 
older people, but the horror of the dark and 
of the unknown which some children have is 
not a thing to be laughed at, nor should it 
be unsympathetically combated. One must 
remember that experience has not taught a 
child scepticism; he thinks that anything in 
the world may happen; and all the monsters 
of nursery tales, goblins, witches, evil fairies, 
dragons, which a child in daylight will know 
to be imaginary, begin, as the dusk draws 
on, to become appalling possibilities. They 
may be somewhere about, lurking in cellars 
and cupboards and lofts and dark entries 
by day, and at night they may slip out to do 
what harm they can. For children, not far 
from the gates of birth, are still strongly the 
victims of primeval and inherited fears, not 



Fears of Childhood 45 

corrected by the habitual current of life. It 
is not a reason for depriving children of the 
joys of the old tales and the exercise of the 
faculty of wonder; but the tendency should 
be very carefully guarded and watched, 
because these sudden shocks may make 
indelible marks, and leave a little weak spot 
in the mind which may prove difficult to heal. 
It is not only these spectral terrors against 
which children have to be guarded. All 
severity and sharp indignity of punishment, 
all intemperate anger, all roughness of treat- 
ment, should be kept in strict restraint. 
There are noisy, boisterous, healthy children, 
of course, who do not resent or even dread 
sharp usage. But it is not always easy to 
discover the sensitive child, because fear of 
displeasure will freeze him into a stupor of 
apparent dulness and stubbornness. I am 
always infuriated by stupid people who 
regret the disappearance of sharp, stern, 
peremptory punishments, and lament the 
softness of the rising generation. If punish- 
ment must be inflicted, it should be done 



46 Where No Fear Was 

good-naturedly and robustly as a natural tit- 
for-tat. Anger should be reserved for things 
like spitefulness and dishonesty and cruelty. 
There is nothing more utterly confusing to 
the childish mind than to have trifling faults 
treated with wrath and indignation. It is 
true that in the world of nature, punish- 
ment seems often wholly disproportionate 
to offences. Nature will penalise careless- 
ness in a disastrous fashion, and spare the 
cautious and prudent sinner. But there is 
no excuse for us, if we have any sense of 
justice and patience at all, for not setting a 
better example. We ought to show children 
that there is a moral order which we are 
endeavouring to administer. If parents and 
schoolmasters, who are both judges and 
executioners, allow their own rule to be for- 
tuitous, indulge their own irritable moods, 
punish severely a trifling fault, and sentimen- 
talise or condone a serious one, a child is 
utterly confused. I know several people who 
have had their lives blighted, have been made 
suspicious, cynical, crafty, and timid, by se- 



Fears of Childhood 47 

vere usage and bullying and open contempt 
in childhood. The thing to avoid, for all 
who are responsible in the smallest degree 
for the nurture of children, is to call in the 
influence of fear; one may speak plainly of 
consequences, but even there one must not 
exaggerate, as schoolmasters often do, for 
the best of motives, about moral faults; one 
may punish deliberate and repeated disobedi- 
ence, wanton cruelty, persistent and selfish 
disregard of the rights of others, but one must 
warn many times, and never try to triumph 
over a fault by the infliction of a shock of 
any kind. The shock is the most cruel and 
cowardly sort of punishment, and if we wil- 
fully use it, then we are perpetuating the sad 
tyranny of instinctive fear, and using the 
strength of a great angel to do the work of a 
demon, such as I saw long ago in the old 
magazine, and whose tyranny I felt for many 
days. 

As a child, the one thing I was afraid of was 
the possibility of my father's displeasure. We 
did not see a great deal of him, because he 



48 Where No Fear Was 

was a much occupied headmaster ; and he was 
to me a stately and majestic presence, before 
whom the whole created world seemed 
visibly to bow. But he was deeply anxious 
about our upbringing, and had a very strong 
sense of his responsibility; and he would 
sometimes reprove us rather sternly for some 
extremely trifling thing, the way one ate one's 
food, or spoke, or behaved. This descended 
upon me as a cloud of darkness ; I attempted 
no excuses, I did not explain or defend my- 
self; I simply was crushed and confounded. 
I do not think it was the right method. He 
never punished us, but we were not at 
ease with him. I remember the agony with 
which I heard a younger sister once repeat to 
him some silly and profane little jokes which 
a good-natured and absurd old lady had 
told us in the nursery. I felt sure he would 
disapprove, as he did. I knew quite well in 
my childish mind that it was harmless non- 
sense, and did not give us a taste for ungodly 
mirth. But I could not intervene or expostu- 
late. I am sure that my father had not the 



Fears of Childhood 49 

slightest idea how weighty and dominant he 
was ; but many of the things he rebuked would 
have been better not noticed, or if noticed 
only made fun of, while I feel that he ought 
to have given us more opportunity of stating 
our case. He simply frightened me into 
having a different morality when I was in his 
presence to what I had elsewhere. But he 
did not make me love goodness thereby, and 
only gave me a sense that certain things, 
harmless in themselves, must not be done or 
said in the presence of papa. He did not 
always remember his own rules, and there 
was thus an element of injustice in his 
rebukes, which one merely accepted as part 
of his awful and unaccountable greatness. 
When I was transferred to a private school, 
a great big place, very well managed in every 
way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror of 
everything and everybody. I was conscious 
of a great code of rules which I did not know 
or understand, which I might quite unwit- 
tingly break, and the consequences of which 
might be fatal. I was never punished or 
4 



50 Where No Fear Was 

caned, nor was I ever bullied. But I simply 
effaced myself as far as possible, and lived in 
dread of disaster. The thought even now of 
certain high blank walls with lofty barred 
windows, the remembered smells of certain 
passages and corners, the tall form and flash- 
ing eye of our headmaster and the faint 
fragrance of Havana cigars which hung 
about him, the bare corridors with their 
dark cupboards, the stone stairs and iron 
railings — all this gives me a far-off sense of 
dread. I can give no reason for my unhappi- 
ness there; but I can recollect waking in the 
early summer mornings, hearing the screams 
of peacocks from an adjoining garden, and 
thinking with a dreadful sense of isolation and 
despair at all the possibilities of disaster that 
lay hid in the day. I am sure it was not a 
wholesome experience. One need not fear 
the world more than is necessary — but my 
only dream of peace was the escape to the 
delights of home, and the thought of the 
larger world was only a thing that I shrank 
from and shuddered at. 



Fears of Childhood 51 

No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, 
but how few they seemed and how clearly 
they stand out! I did not make friends 
among the boys; they were pleasant enough 
acquaintances, some of them, but not to be 
trusted or confided in ; they had to be kept at 
arm's length, and one's real life guarded and 
hoarded away from them ; because if one told 
them anything about one's home or one's 
ideas, it might be repeated, and the sacred 
facts shouted in one's ears as taunts and jests. 
But there was a little bluff master, a clergy- 
man, with shaggy rippled red-brown hair and 
a face like a pug-dog. He was kind to me, 
and had me to lunch one Sunday in a villa out 
at Barnes — that was a breath of life, to sit in 
a homelike room and look at old Punches half 
the afternoon; and there was another young 
man, a master, rather stout and pale, with 
whom I shared some little jokes, and who 
treated me as he might treat a younger 
brother; he was pledged, I remember, to 
give me a cake if I won an Eton Scholarship, 
and royally he redeemed his promise. He 



52 Where No Fear Was 

died of heart disease a little while after I left 
the school. I had promised to write to him 
from Eton and never did so, and I had a little 
pang about that when I heard of his death. 
And then there was the kind, handsome, loud- 
voiced maid of my dormitory, Underwood by 
name, who was always just and kind, and 
who, even when she rated us, as she did at 
times, had always something human beckon- 
ing from her handsome eye. I can see her 
now, with her sleeves tucked up, and her big 
white muscular arms, washing a refractory 
little boy who fought shy of soap and water. 
I had a wild idea of giving her a kiss when I 
went away, and I think she would have liked 
that. She told me I had always been a good 
boy, and that she was sorry that I was going ; 
but I did not dare to embrace her. 

And then there was dear Louisa, the 
matron of the little sanatorium on the Mort- 
lake road. She had been a former housemaid 
of ours; she was a strong, sturdy woman, with 
a deep voice like a man's ; and when I arrived 
there ill — I was often ill in those days — she 



Fears of Childhood 53 

used to hug and kiss me and even cry over 
me; and the happiest days I spent at school 
were in that poky little house, reading in 
Louisa's little parlour, while she prepared 
some special dish as a treat for my supper, 
or sitting hour by hour at the window of my 
room upstairs, watching a grocer opposite set 
out his window. I certainly did love Louisa 
with all my heart ; and it was almost pleasant 
to be ill, to be welcomed by her and petted 
and made much of. "My own dear boy," 
she used to say, and it was music in my ears. 
I feel on looking back that, if I had children 
of my own, I should study very carefully to 
avoid any sort of terrorism. Psychologists 
tell us that the nervous shocks of early years 
are the things that leave indelible marks 
throughout life. I believe that mental 
specialists often make a careful study of the 
dreams of those whose minds are afflicted, 
because it is held that dreams very often 
continue to reproduce in later life the mental 
shocks of childhood. Anger, intemperate 
punishment, any attempt to produce instant 



54 Where No Fear Was 

submission and dismay in children, is very apt 
to hurt the nervous organisation. Of course 
it is easy enough to be careful about these 
things in sheltered environments, where 
there is some security and refinement of life. 
And this opens up a vast problem which 
cannot be touched on here, because it is 
practically certain that many children in 
poor and unsatisfactory homes sustain shocks 
to their mental organisation in early life 
which damage them irreparably, and which 
could be avoided if they could be brought 
up on more wholesome and tender lines. 



VII 

FEARS OF BOYHOOD 

There is a tendency, I am sure, in books, 
to shirk the whole subject of fear, as though 
it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almost 
unmentionable. The coward, the timid per- 
son, receives very little sympathy; he is 
rather like one tainted with a shocking dis- 
ease, of which the less said the better. He is 
not viewed with any sympathy or commisera- 
tion, but as something almost lower in the 
scale of humanity. Take the literature that 
deals with school life, for instance. I do not 
think that there is any province of our litera- 
ture so inept, so conventional, so entirely 
lacking in reality, as the books which deal 
with the life of schools. The difficulty of 
writing them is very great, because they can 
be reconstructed only by an effort of memory. 

55 



56 Where No Fear Was 

The boy himself is quite unable to give ex- 
pression to his thoughts and feelings; school 
life is a time of sharp, eager, often rather 
savage emotions, lived by beings who have no 
sense of proportion, no knowledge of life, 
no idea of what is really going on in the world. 
The actual incidents which occur are very 
trivial, and yet to the fresh minds and spirits 
of boyhood they seem all charged with an 
intense significance. Then again the talk of 
schoolboys is wholly immature and shape- 
less. They cannot express themselves, and 
moreover there is a very strict and per- 
emptory convention which dictates what 
may be talked about and what may not. 
No society in the world is under so oppressive 
a taboo. They must not speak of anything 
emotional or intellectual, at the cost of being 
thought a fool or a prig. They talk about 
games, they gossip about boys and masters, 
sometimes their conversation is nasty and 
bestial. But it conceals very real if very 
fitful emotions; yet it is impossible to recall 
or to reconstruct; and when older people 



Fears of Boyhood 57 

attempt to reconstruct it, they remember 
the emotions which underlay it, and the 
eager interests out of which it all sprang; 
and they make it something picturesque, 
epigrammatic, and vernacular which is 
wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the 
talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost 
wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in 
glance and gesture, not in word at all. I 
suppose that most of us remember our boyish 
friendships, ardent and eager personal admi- 
rations, extraordinary deifications of quite 
commonplace boys, emotions none of which 
were ever put into words at all, hardly even 
into coherent thought, and were yet a swift 
and vital current of the soul. 

Now the most unreal part of the recon- 
structions of school life is the insistence on 
the boyish code of honour. Neither as a 
boy nor as a schoolmaster did I ever have 
much evidence of this. There were certain 
hard and fast rules of conduct, like the rule 
which prevented any boy from giving infor- 
mation to a master against another boy. 



58 Where No Fear Was 

But this was not a conscientious thing. It 
was part of the tradition, and the social 
ostracism which was the penalty of its in- 
fraction was too severe to risk incurring. 
But the boys who cut a schoolfellow for 
telling tales, did not do it from any high- 
minded sense of violated honour. It 
was simply a piece of self-defence, and the 
basis of the convention was merely this, 
that, if the rule were broken, it would pro- 
duce an impossible sense of insecurity and 
peril. However much boys might on the 
whole approve of, respect, and even like 
their masters, still they could not make 
common cause with them. The school was a 
perfectly definite community, inside of which 
it was often convenient and pleasant to do 
things which would be penalised if dis- 
covered; and thus the whole stability of 
that society depended upon a certain secrecy. 
The masters were not disliked for finding out 
the infractions of rules, if only such infrac- 
tions were patent and obvious. A master 
who looked too closely into things, who 



Fears of Boyhood 59 

practised any sort of espionage, who tried to 
extort confession, was disapproved of as a 
menace, and it was convenient to label him a 
sneak and a spy, and to say that he did not 
play the game fair. But all this was a mere 
tradition. Boys do not reflect much, or 
look into the reasons of things. It does not 
occur to them to credit masters with the 
motive of wishing to protect them against 
themselves, to minimise temptation, to 
shelter them from undesirable influences; 
that perhaps dawns on the minds of sensible 
and high-minded prefects, but the ordinary- 
boy just regards the master as an opposing 
power, whom he hoodwinks if he can. 

And then the boyish ideal of courage is a 
very incomplete one. He does not recognise 
it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, and 
right-minded boy risks unpopularity by 
telling a master of some evil practice which 
is spreading in a school. He simply regards 
it as a desire to meddle, a priggish and prag- 
matical act, and even as a sneaking desire 
to inflict punishment by proxy. 



60 Where No Fear Was 

Courage, for the schoolboy, is merely 
physical courage, aplomb, boldness, reck- 
lessness, high-handedness. The hero of school 
life is one like Odysseus, who is strong, 
inventive, daring, full of resource. The 
point is to come out on the top. Odysseus 
yields to sensual delight, he is cruel, vindic- 
tive, and incredibly deceitful. It is evident 
that successful beguiling, the power of telling 
an elaborate, plausible, and imperturbable 
lie on occasions, is an heroic quality in the 
Odyssey. Odysseus is not a man who scorns 
to deceive, or who would rather take the 
consequences than utter a falsehood. His 
strength lies rather in his power, when at 
bay, of flashing into some monstrous fiction, 
dramatising the situation, playing an adopted 
part, with confidence and assurance. One 
sees traces of the same thing in the Bible. 
The story of Jacob deceiving Isaac and pre- 
tending to be Esau in order to secure a bless- 
ing is not related with disapprobation. 
Jacob does not forfeit his blessing when his 
deceit is discovered. The whole incident is 



Fears of Boyhood 61 

regarded rather as a master-stroke of cun- 
ning and inventiveness. Esau is angry 
not because Jacob has employed such 
trickery, but because he has succeeded in 
supplanting him. 

I remember, as a boy at Eton, seeing a 
scene which left a deep impression on me. 
There was a big unpleasant, unscrupulous boy 
of great physical strength, who was a noted 
football player. He was extremely unpopu- 
lar in the school, because he was rude, sulky, 
and overbearing, and still more because he 
took unfair advantages in games. There 
was a hotly contested house-match, in which 
he tried again and again to evade rules, 
while he was for ever appealing to the 
umpires against violations of rule by the 
opposite side. His own house was ultimately 
victorious, but feeling ran very high indeed, 
because it was thought that the victory was 
unfairly won. The crowd of boys who 
had been watching the match drifted away 
in a state of great exasperation, and finally 
collected in front of the house of the unpopu- 



62 Where No Fear Was 

lar player, hissed and hooted him. He took 
very little notice of the demonstration and 
walked in, when there arose a babel of howls. 
He turned round and came out again, facing 
the crowd. I can see him now, all splashed 
and muddy, with his shirt open at the neck. 
He was pale, ugly, and sinister; but he sur- 
veyed us all with entire effrontery, drew out 
a pince-nez, being very short-sighted, and 
then looked calmly round as if surprised. I 
have certainly never seen such an exhibition 
of courage in my life. He knew that he had 
not a single friend present, and he did not 
know that he would not be maltreated — there 
were indications of a rush being made. He 
did not look in the least picturesque; he was 
ugly, scowling, offensive. But he did not 
care a rap, and if he had been attacked, he 
would have defended himself with a will. It 
did not occur to me then, nor did it, I think 
occur to anyone else, what an amazing bit of 
physical and moral courage it was. No one, 
then or after, had the slightest feeling of 
admiration for his pluck. " Did you ever see 



Fears of Boyhood 63 

such a brute as P looked?" was the only- 
sort of comment made. 

This just serves to illustrate my point, 
that boys have no real discernment for what 
is courageous. What they admire is a 
certain grace and spirit, and the hero is not 
one who constrains himself to do an unpopu- 
lar thing from a sense of duty, not even the 

boy who, being unpopular like P , does 

a satanically brave thing. Boys have no 
admiration for the boy who defies them; what 
they like to see is the defiance of a common 
foe. They admire gallant, modest, spirited, 
picturesque behaviour, not the dull and faith- 
ful obedience to the sense of right. 

Of course, things have altered for the 
better. Masters are no longer stern, se- 
vere, abrupt, formidable, unreasonable. They 
know that many a boy, who would be inclined 
on the whole to tell the truth, can easily be 
frightened into telling a lie ; but they have not 
yet contrived to put the sense of honour 
among boys in the right proportion. Such 
stories as that of George Washington — when 



64 Where No Fear Was 

the children were asked who had cut down 
the cherry-tree, and he rose and said, " Sir, 
I cannot tell a lie ; it was I who did it with 
my little hatchet" — do not really take the 
imagination of boys captive. How constant- 
ly did worthy preachers at Eton tell the story 
of how Bishop Selwyn, as a boy, rose and left 
the room at a boat-supper because an im- 
proper song was sung! That anecdote was 
regarded with undisguised amusement, and 
it was simply thought to be a piece of prig- 
gishness. I cannot imagine that any boy 
ever heard the story and went away with a 
glowing desire to do likewise. The incident 
really belongs to the domain of manners 
rather than to that of morals. 

The truth is really that boys at school 
have a code which resembles that of the old 
chivalry. The hero may be sensual, un- 
scrupulous, cruel, selfish, indifferent to the 
welfare of others. But if he bears himself 
gallantly, if he has a charm of look and 
manner, if he is a deft performer in the pre- 
scribed athletics, he is the object of profound 



Fears of Boyhood 65 

and devoted admiration. It is really physi- 
cal courage, skill, prowess, personal attrac- 
tiveness, which are envied and praised. A 
dull, heavy, painstaking, conscientious boy 
with a sturdy sense of duty may be respected, 
but he is not followed ; while the imaginative, 
sensitive, nervous, highly-strung boy, who 
may have the finest qualities of all within 
him, is apt to be the most despised. Such 
a boy is often no good at games, because 
public performance disconcerts him; he can- 
not make a ready answer, he has no aplomb, 
no cheek, no smartness; and he is con- 
sequently thought very little of. 

To what extent this sort of instinctive pre- 
ference can be altered, I do not know; it 
certainly cannot be altered by sermons, and 
still less by edicts. Old Dr. Keate said, 
when he was addressing the school on the 
subject of fighting, "I must say that I like 
to see a boy return a blow ! " It seems, if one 
considers it, to be a curious ideal to start life 
with, considering how little opportunity 
civilisation now gives for returning blows! 
5 



66 Where No Fear Was 

Boys in fact are still educated under a system 
which seems to anticipate a combative and 
disturbed sort of life to follow, in which 
strength and agility, violence and physical 
activity, will have a value. Yet, as a 
matter of fact, such things have very little 
substantial value in an ordinary citizen's 
life at* all, except in so far as they play their 
part in the elaborate cult of athletic exer- 
cises, with which we beguile the instinct 
which craves for manual toil. All the 
races, and games, and athletics cultivated so 
assiduously at school seem now to have very 
little aim in view. It is not important for 
ordinary life to be able to run a hundred 
yards or even three miles faster than another 
man; the judgment, the quickness of eye, 
the strength and swiftness of muscle needed 
to make a man a good batsman were all well 
enough in days when a man's life might after- 
wards depend on his use of sword and battle- 
axe. But now it enables him only to play 
games rather longer than other people, and to 
a certain extent ministers to bodily health, 



Fears of Boyhood 67 

although the statistics of rowing would seem 
clearly to prove that it is a pursuit which is 
rather more apt to damage the vitality of 
strong boys than to increase the vitality of 
weak ones. 

So, if we look facts fairly in the face, we see 
that much of the training of school life, 
especially in the direction of athletics, is really 
little more than the maintenance of a thought- 
less old tradition, and that it is all directed to 
increase our admiration of prowess and grace 
and gallantry, rather than to fortify us in use- 
fulness and manual skill and soundness of 
body. A boy at school may be a skilful 
carver or carpenter; he may have a real gift 
for engineering or mechanics ; he may even be 
a good rider, a first-rate fisherman, an excel- 
lent shot. He may have good intellectual 
abilities, a strong memory, a power of expres- 
sion; he may be a sound mathematician, a 
competent scientist ; he may have all sorts of 
excellent moral qualities, be reliable, accu- 
rate, truthful, punctual, duty-loving ; he may, 
in fact, be equipped for life and citizenship, 



68 Where No Fear Was 

able to play his part sturdily and manfully, 
and to do the world good service ; but yet he 
may never win the smallest recognition or 
admiration in his school days, while all the 
glory and honour and credit is still reserved 
for the graceful, attractive, high-spirited 
athlete, who may have nothing else in the 
background. 

That is certainly the ideal of the boy, and 
the disconcerting thing is that it is also the 
ideal, practically if not theoretically, of the 
parent and the schoolmaster. The school 
still reserves all its best gifts, its sunshine and 
smiles, for the knightly and the skilful; it 
rewards all the qualities that are their own 
reward. Why, if it wishes to get the right 
scale adopted, does it not reward the thing 
which it professes to uphold as its best result, 
worth of character namely? It claims to be 
a training-ground for character first, but it 
does little to encourage secret and unobtru- 
sive virtues. That is, it adds its prizes to the 
things which the natural man values, and it 
neglects to crown the one thing at which it 



Fears of Boyhood 69 

professes first to aim. In doing this it only 
endorses the verdict of the world, and while 
it praises moral effort, it rewards success. 
The issue of all this is that the sort of 
courage which it enforces is essentially a 
graceful and showy sort of courage, a lively 
readiness, a high-hearted fearlessness — so 
that timidity and slowness and diffidence 
and unreadiness become base and feeble 
qualities, when they are not the things of 
which anyone need be ashamed ! Let me say 
then that moral courage, the patient and 
unrecognised facing of difficulties, the dis- 
regard of popular standards, solidity and 
steadfastness of purpose, the tranquil per- 
formance of tiresome and disagreeable duties, 
homely perseverance, are not the things 
which are regarded as supreme in the ideal 
of the school; so that the fear which is the 
shadow of sensitive and imaginative natures 
is turned into the wrong channels, and 
becomes a mere dread of doing the unpopular 
and unimpressive thing, or a craven deter- 
mination not to be found out. And the dread 



70 Where No Fear Was 

of being obscure and unacceptable is what 
haunts the minds of boys brought up on 
these ambitious and competitive lines, rather 
than the fear which is the beginning of 
wisdom. 



VIII 

FEARS OF YOUTH 

The fears of youth are, as a rule, just the 
terrors of self-consciousness and shyness. 
They are a very irrational thing, something 
purely instinctive and of old inheritance. 
How irrational they are is best proved by the 
fact that shyness is caused mostly by the 
presence of strangers; there are many young 
people who are bashful, awkward, and 
tongue-tied in the presence of strangers, 
whose tremors wholly disappear in the family 
circle. If these were rational fears, they 
might be caused by the consciousness of the 
inspection and possible disapproval of those 
among whom one lives, and whose annoyance 
and criticism might have unpleasant practical 
effects. Yet they are caused often by the 
presence of those whose disapproval is not 

71 



72 Where No Fear Was 

of the smallest consequence, those, in fact, 
whom one is not likely to see again. One 
must look then for the cause of this, not in the 
fact that one's awkwardness and inefficiency 
is likely to be blamed by those of one's own 
circle, but simply in the terror of the unknown 
and the unfamiliar. It is probably therefore 
an old inherited instinct, coming from a time 
when the sight of a stranger might contain in 
it a menace of some hostile usage. If one 
questions a shy boy or girl as to what it is 
they are afraid of in the presence of strangers, 
they are quite unable to answer. They are 
not afraid of anything that will be said or 
done ; and yet they will have become intensely 
conscious of their own appearance and move- 
ments and dress, and will be quite unable to 
command themselves. That it is a thing 
which can be easily cured is obvious from the 
fact which I often observed when I was a 
schoolmaster, that, as a rule, the boys who 
came from houses where there was much 
entertaining, and a constant coming and 
going of guests, very rarely suffered from 



Fears of Youth 73 

such shyness. They had got used to the fact 
that strangers could be depended upon to be 
kind and friendly, and instead of looking 
upon a new person as a possible foe, they 
regarded him as a probable friend. 

I often think that parents do not take 
enough trouble in this respect to make 
children used to strangers. What often 
happens is that parents are themselves shy 
and embarrassed in the presence of strangers, 
and when they notice that their children 
suffer from the same awkwardness, they 
criticise them afterwards, partly because 
they are vexed at their own clumsy per- 
formance; and thus the shyness is increased, 
because the child, in addition to his sense of 
shyness before strangers, has in the back- 
ground of his mind the feeling that any 
mauvaise honte that he may display may be 
commented upon afterwards. No exhibition 
of shyness on the part of a boy or girl should 
ever be adverted to by parents. They 
should take for granted that no one is ever 
willingly shy, and that it is a misery which 



74 Where No Fear Was 

all would avoid if they could. It is even 
better to allow children considerable free- 
dom of speech with strangers, than to repress 
and silence them. Of course, impertinence 
and unpleasant comments, such as children 
will sometimes make on the appearance or 
manners of strangers, must be checked, but 
it should be on the grounds of the unpleasant- 
ness of such remarks, and not on the ground 
of forwardness. On the other hand, all 
attempts on the part of a child to be friendly 
and courteous to strangers should be noted 
and praised; a child should be encouraged to 
look upon itself as an integral part of a circle, 
and not as a silent and lumpish auditor. 
Probably too there are certain physical and 
psychological laws, which we do not at all 
understand, which account for the curious 
subjective effects which certain people have 
at close quarters ; there is something hypnotic 
and mesmeric about the glance of certain 
eyes ; and there is in all probability a curious 
blending of mental currents in an assembly 
of people, which is not a mere fancy, but a 



Fears of Youth 75 

very real physical fact. Personalities radiate 
very real and unmistakable influences, and 
probably the undercurrent of thought which 
happens to be in one's mind when one is 
with others has an effect, even if one says or 
' does nothing to indicate one's preoccupation. 
A certain amount of this comes from an 
unconscious inference on the part of the 
recipients. We often augur, without any 
very definite rational process, from the facial 
expressions, gestures, movements, tones of 
others, what their frame of mind is. But I 
believe that there is a great deal more than 
that. We must all know that when we are 
with friends to whose moods and emotions we 
are attuned, there takes place a singular 
degree of thought-transference, quite apart 
from speech. I had once a great friend with 
whom I was accustomed to spend much 
time tete-d-tete. We used to travel together 
and spend long periods, day after day, in 
close conjunction, often indeed sharing the 
same bedroom. It became a matter at first 
of amusement and interest, but afterwards an 



76 Where No Fear Was 

accepted fact, that we could often realise, 
even after a long silence, in what direction the 
other's thought was travelling. "How did 
you guess I was thinking of that?" would be 
asked. To which the reply was, "I did not 
guess— I knew. " On the other hand, I have 
an old and familiar friend, whom I know well 
and regard with great affection, but whose 
presence, and particularly a certain fixity of 
glance, often, even now, causes me a curious 
subjective disturbance which is not wholly 
pleasant, a sense of some odd psychical con- 
trol which is not entirely agreeable. 

I have another friend who is the most 
delightful and easy company in the world 
when we are alone together; but he is a 
sensitive and highly-strung creature, much 
affected by personal influences, and when I 
meet him in the company of other people he 
is often almost unrecognisable. His mind 
becomes critical, combative, acrid; he does 
not say what he means, he is touched by a 
vague excitement, and there passes over him 
an unnatural sort of brilliance, of a hard and 



Fears of Youth 77 

futile kind, which makes him sacrifice con- 
sideration and friendliness to the instinctive 
desire to produce an effect and to score a 
point. I sometimes actually detest him 
when he is one of a circle. I feel inclined to 
say to him, "If only you could let your real 
self appear, and drop this tiresome posturing 
and fencing, you would be as delightful as you 
are to me when I am alone with you ; but this 
hectic tittering and feverish jocosity is not 
only not your real self, but it gives others 
an impression of a totally unreal and not 
very agreeable person." But, alas, this is 
just the sort of thing one cannot say to a 
friend ! 

As one goes on in life, this terrible and 
disconcerting shyness of youth disappears. 
We begin to realise, with a wholesome loss 
of vanity and conceit, how very little people 
care or even notice how we are dressed, how 
we look, what we say. We learn that other 
people are as much preoccupied with their 
thoughts and fancies and reflections as 
we are with our own. We realise that if 



78 Where No Fear Was 

we are anxious to produce an agreeable 
impression, we do so far more by being 
interested and sympathetic, than by attempt- 
ing a brilliance which we cannot command. 
We perceive that other people are not par- 
ticularly interested in our crude views, nor 
very grateful for the expression of them. We 
acquire the power of combination and co- 
operation, in losing the desire for splendour 
and domination. We see that people value 
ease and security, more than they admire 
originality and fantastic contradiction. And 
so we come to the blessed time when, instead 
of reflecting after a social occasion whether 
we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider 
rather the impression we have formed of 
other personalities. 

I believe that we ought to have recourse 
to very homely remedies indeed for combat- 
ing shyness. It is of no use to try to console 
and distract ourselves with lofty thoughts, 
and to try to keep eternity and the hopes of 
man in mind. We so become only more 
self-conscious and superior than ever. The 



Fears of Youth 79 

fact remains that the shyness of youth 
causes agonies both of anticipation and 
retrospect; if one really wishes to get rid of 
it, the only way is to determine to get used 
somehow to society, and not to endeavour to 
avoid it; and as a practical rule to make up 
one's mind, if possible, to ask people ques- 
tions, rather than to meditate impressive 
answers. Asking other people questions 
about things to which they are likely to know 
the answers is one of the shortest cuts to 
popularity and esteem. It is wonderful to 
reflect how much distress personal bashful- 
ness causes people, how much they would 
give to be rid of it, and yet how very little 
trouble they ever take to acquiring any 
method of dealing with the difficulty. I 
see a good deal of undergraduates, and am 
often aware that they are friendly and 
responsive, but without any power of giving 
expression to it. I sometimes see them 
suffering acutely from shyness before my 
eyes. But a young man who can bring 
himself to ask a perfectly simple ques- 



80 Where No Fear Was 

tion about some small matter of common 
interest is comparatively rare; and yet it 
is generally the simplest way out of the 
difficulty. 



IX ■ 

FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE 

Now with all the tremors, reactions, glooms, 
shadows, and despairs of youth — it is easy 
enough to forget them, but they were there — 
goes a power of lifting and lighting up in a 
moment at a chord of music, a glance, a word, 
the song of a bird, the scent of a flower, a 
flying sunburst, which fills life up like a cup 
with bubbling and sparkling liquor. 

My soul, be patient! Thou shalt find 
A little matter mend all this ! 

And that is the part of youth which we 
remember, till on looking back it seems like a 
time of wandering with like-hearted comrades 
down some sweet-scented avenue of golden 
sun and green shade. Our memory plays us 
beautifully false — splendide mendax — till one 

6 81 



82 Where No Fear Was 

wishes sometimes that old and wise men, 
retelling the story of their life, could recall for 
the comfort of youth some part of its lan- 
guors and mischances, its bitter jealousies, its 
intense and poignant sense of failure. 

And then in a moment the door of life 
opens. One day I was an irresponsible 
pleasure-loving, fantastic youth, and a week 
later I was, or it seemed to me that I was, a 
professional man with all the cares of a 
pedagogue upon my back. It filled me at 
first, I remember, with a gleeful amazement to 
find myself at the desk, holding forth, instead 
of on the form listening. It seemed delicious 
at first to have the power of correcting and 
slashing exercises, and placing boys in order, 
instead of being corrected and examined, and 
competing for a place. It was a solemn game 
at the outset. Then came the other side of 
the picture. One's pupils were trouble- 
some, they did badly in examinations, they 
failed unaccountably ; and one had a glimpse 
too of some of the tragedies of school life. 
Almost insensibly I became aware that I had 



Fears of Middle Age 83 

a task to perform, that my mistakes involved 
boys in disaster, that I had the anxious care 
of other destinies; and thus, almost before I 
knew it, came a new cloud on the horizon, the 
cloud of anxiety. I could not help seeing 
that I had mismanaged this boy and mis- 
directed that ; that one could not treat them 
as ingenuous and lively playthings, but that 
what one said and did set a mark which 
perhaps could not be effaced. Gradually 
other doubts and problems made them- 
selves felt. I had to administer a system of 
education in which I did not wholly believe; 
I saw little by little that the rigid old system 
of education was a machine which, if it made 
a highly accomplished product out of the 
best material, wasted an enormous amount of 
boyish interest and liveliness, and stultified 
the feebler sort of mind. Then came the care 
of a boarding-house, close relations with 
parents, a more real knowledge of the infinite 
levity of boy nature. I became mixed up 
with the politics of the place, the chance of 
more ambitious positions floated before me; 



84 Where No Fear Was 

the need for tact, discretion, judiciousness, 
moderation, tolerance emphasised itself. I 
am here outlining my own experience, but 
it is only one of many similar experiences. I 
became a citizen without knowing it, and my 
place in the world, my status, success, all 
became definite things which I had to secure. 
The cares, the fears, the anxieties of middle 
life lie for most men and women in this 
region ; if people are healthy and active, they 
generally arrive at a considerable degree of 
equanimity; they do not anticipate evil, and 
they take the problems of life cheerfully 
enough as they come ; but yet come they do, 
and too many men and women are tempted to 
throw overboard scornfully and disdainfully 
the dreams of youth as a luxury which they 
cannot afford to indulge, and to immerse 
themselves in practical cares, month after 
month, with perhaps the hope of a fairly 
careless and idle holiday at intervals. What 
I think tends to counteract this for many 
people is love and marriage, the wonder and 
amazement of having children of their own, 



Fears of Middle Age 85 

and all the offices of tenderness that grow up 
naturally beside their path. But this again 
brings a whole host of fears and anxieties 
as well — arrangements, ways and means, 
household cares, illnesses, the homely stuff 
of life, much of it enjoyed, much of it cheer- 
fully borne, and often very bravely and 
gallantly endured. It is out of this simple 
material that life has to be constructed. 
But there is a twofold danger in all this. 
There is a danger of cynicism, the frame of 
mind in which a man comes to face little 
worries as one might put up an umbrella 
in a shower — "Thou know'st 'tis common!" 
Out of that grows up a rude dreariness, a 
philosophy which has nothing dignified about 
it, but is merely a recognition of the fact 
that life is a poor affair, and that one cannot 
hope to have things to one's mind. Or there 
is a dull frame of mind which implies a meek 
resignation, a sense of disappointment about 
life, borne with a mournful patience, a sense 
of one's sphere having somehow fallen short 
of one's deserts. This produces the grumpy 



86 Where No Fear Was 

paterfamilias who drowses over a paper or 
grumbles over a pipe; such a man is inimi- 
tably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage. 
That sort of ugly disillusionment, that 
publicity of disappointment, that frank dis- 
regard of all concerns except one's own, is 
one of the most hideous features of middle- 
class life, and it is rather characteristically 
English. It sometimes conceals a robust 
good sense and even kindliness; but it 
is a base thing at best, and seems to be the 
shadow of commerical prosperity. Yet it at 
least implies a certain sturdiness of character, 
and a stubborn belief in one's own merits 
which is quite impervious to the lessons of 
experience. On sensitive and imaginative 
people the result of the professional struggle 
with life, the essence of which is often social 
pretentiousness, is different. It ends in a 
mournful and distracted kind of fatigue, a 
tired sort of padding along after life, a timid 
bewilderment at conditions which one cannot 
alter, and which yet have no dignity or 
seemliness. 



Fears of Middle Age 87 

What is there that is wrong with all this? 
The cause is easy enough to analyse. It is 
the result of a system which develops con- 
ventional, short-sighted, complicated house- 
holds, averse to effort, fond of pleasure, and 
with tastes which are expensive without 
being refined. The only cure would seem 
to be that men and women should be born 
different, with simple, active, generous na- 
tures; it is easy to say that! But the worst 
of the situation is that the sordid banality 
and ugly tragedy of their lot do not dawn on 
the people concerned. Greedy vanity in the 
more robust, lack of moral courage and firm- 
ness in the more sensitive, with a social organi- 
sation that aims at a surface dignity and 
a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this 
devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it 
has no fine elements at all. There is a 
nobility about real tragedy which evokes a 
quality of passionate and sincere emotion. 
There is something essentially exalted about 
a fierce resistance, a desperate failure. But 
this abject, listless dreariness, which can 



88 Where No Fear Was 

hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable 
floating down the muddy current, where there 
is no sharp repentance or fiery battling, 
nothing but a mean abandonment to a 
meaningless and unintelligible destiny, seems 
to have in it no seed of recovery at all. 

The dark shadow of professional anxiety is 
that it has no tragic quality ; it is like plough- 
ing on day by day through endless mud-flats. 
One does not feel, in the presence of sharp 
suffering or bitter loss, that they ought not to 
exist. They are there, stern, implacable, 
august; stately enemies, great combatants. 
There is a significance about their very awful- 
ness. One may fall before them, but they 
pass like a great express train, roaring, 
flashing, things deliberately and intently 
designed; but these dull failures which seem 
not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing 
or wilful passion, but of everyone's laziness 
and greediness and stupidity, how is one to 
face them? It is the helpless death of 
the quagmire, not the death of the fight or 
the mountain-top. Is there, we ask our- 



Fears of Middle Age 89 

selves, anything in the mind of God which 
corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, 
if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream 
can overflow the world? The bourgeois 
ideal! One would rather have tyranny or 
savagery than anything so gross and smug. 

And yet we see high-spirited and ardent 
husbands drawn into this by obstinate and 
vulgar-minded wives. We see fme-natured 
and sensitive women engulfed in it by selfish 
and ambitious husbands. The tendency is 
awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not 
by open combat, but by secret and dull per- 
sistence. And one sees too — I have seen it 
many times — children of delicate and eager 
natures, who would have flourished and 
expanded in more generous air, become 
conventional and commonplace and petty, 
concerned about knowing the right people 
and doing the right things, and making the 
same stupid and paltry show, which deceives 
no one. 

There is nothing for it but independence 
and simplicity and, perhaps best of all, a love 



90 Where No Fear Was 

of beauty. William Morris asserted passion- 
ately enough that art was the only cure for 
all this dreariness — the love of beautiful 
sounds and sights and words ; and I think that 
is true, if it be further extended to a perception 
of the quality of beauty in the conduct and 
relations of life. For those are the cheap and 
reasonable pleasures of life, accessible to 
all; and if men and women cared for work 
first and the decent simplicities of wholesome 
living, and could further find their pleasure in 
art, in whatever form, then I believe that 
many of these fears and anxieties, so maim- 
ing and impairing to all that is fine in life, 
would vanish quietly out of being. The 
thing seems both beautiful and possible, 
because one knows of households where it 
is so, and where it grows up naturally and 
easily enough. I know households of both 
kinds — where on the one hand the standard 
is ambitious and mean, where the inmates 
calculate everything with a view to success, 
or rather to producing an impression of suc- 
cess; and there all talk and intercourse is an 



Fears of Middle Age 91 

unreal thing not the outflow of natural inter- 
ests and pleasant tastes, but a sham cul- 
ture and a refinement that is pursued only 
because it is the right sort of surface to 
present to the world. One submits to it with 
boredom, one leaves it with relief. They 
have got the right people together, they 
have shown that they can command their 
attendance; it is all ceremony and waste. 

And then I know households where one 
sees in the books, the pictures, the glances, 
the gestures, the movements of the inmates, 
a sort of grace and delicacy which comes of 
really caring about things that are beauti- 
ful and fine. Sincere things are simply 
said, humour bubbles up and breaks in 
laughter; one feels that light is thrown on a 
hundred topics and facts and personalities. 
The whole of life then becomes a garden 
teeming with strange and wonderful secrets, 
and influences that flash and radiate, passing 
on into some mysterious and fragrant gloom. 
Everything there seems charged with signifi- 
cance and charm; there are no pretences — 



92 Where No Fear Was 

there are preferences, prejudices if you will; 
but there is tolerance and sympathy, and a 
desire to see the point of view of others. The 
effect of such an atmosphere is to set one 
wondering how one has contrived to miss 
the sense of so much that is beautiful and 
interesting in life, and sends one away long- 
ing to perceive more, and determined if 
possible to interpret life more truly and more 
graciously. 



X 

FEARS OF AGE 

And then age creeps on ; and that brings fears 
of its own, and fears that are all the more 
intolerable because they are not definite fears 
at all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which 
attaches itself to the most trivial detail and 
magnifies it into an insuperable difficulty. A 
friend of mine who was growing old once con- 
fided to me that foreign travel, which used to 
be such a delight to him, was now getting 
burdensome. "It is all right when I have 
once started," he said, "but for days before 
I am the prey of all kinds of apprehensions. " 
"What sort of apprehensions?" I said. He 
laughed, and replied, "Well, it is almost too 
absurd to mention, but I find myself op- 
pressed with anxiety for weeks beforehand as to 
whether, when we get to Calais, we shall find 

93 



94 Where No Fear Was 

places in the train." And I remember, too, 
how a woman friend of mine once told me that 
she called at the house of an elderly couple 
in London, people of rank and wealth. Their 
daughter met her in the drawing-room and 
said: "I am glad you are come — you may be 
able to cheer my mother up. We are going 
down to-morrow to our place in the country ; 
the servants and the luggage went this morn- 
ing, and my mother and father are to drive 
down this afternoon — my mother is very 
low about it." "What is the matter?" 
said my friend. The daughter replied, "She 
is afraid that they will not get there in time!" 
" In time for what?" said my friend, thinking 
that there was some important engagement. 
" In time for tea!" said the daughter gravely. 
It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but 
they are not natural fears at all, they just 
indicate a low vitality; they are the symp- 
toms and not the causes of a disease. It is 
the frame of mind of the sluggard in the Bible 
who says, "There is a lion in the way." 
Younger people are apt to be irritated by 



Fears of Age 95 

what seems a wilful creating of apprehen- 
sions. They ought rather to be patient and 
reassuring, and compassionate to the weak- 
ness of nerve for which it stands. 

With such fears as these may be classed all 
the unreal, but none the less distressing, fears 
about health which beset people, all their 
lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoying 
to healthy people to find a man reduced 
to depression and silence at the possibility of 
taking cold, or at the fear of having eaten 
something unwholesome. I remember an 
elderly gentleman who had been a successful 
professional man, and indeed a man of force 
and character, whose activity was entirely 
suspended in later life by his fear of catching 
cold or of over-tiring himself. He was a 
clergyman in a small country parish, and 
used to spend the whole of Sunday between 
his services, in solitary seclusion, " resting, " 
and retire to bed the moment the evening 
service was over ; moreover, his dread of tak- 
ing cold was such that he invariably wore a 
hat in the winter months to go from the 



96 Where No Fear Was 

drawing-room to the dining-room for dinner, 
even if there were guests in his house. He 
used to jest about it, and say that it no doubt 
must look curious ; but he added that he had 
found it a wise precaution, and that we had 
no idea how disabling his colds were. Even 
a very healthy friend of my own standing has 
told me that if he ever lies awake at night he 
is apt to exaggerate the smallest and most 
trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom 
of some dangerous disease. Let me quote 
the well-known case of Hans Andersen, 
whose imagination was morbidly strong. He 
found one morning when he awoke that he 
had a small pimple under his left eyebrow. 
He reflected with distress upon the circum- 
stance, and soon came to the rueful con- 
clusion that the pimple would probably 
increase in size, and deprive him of the sight 
of his left eye. A friend calling upon him in 
the course of the morning found him writing, 
in a mood of solemn resignation, with one 
hand over the eye in question, "practis- 
ing," as he said, "how to read and write 



Fears of Age 97 

with the only eye that would soon be left 
him." 

One's first impulse is to treat these self- 
inflicted sufferings as ridiculous and almost 
idiotic. But they are quite apt to beset 
people of effectiveness and ability. To call 
them irrational does not cure them, because 
they lie deeper than any rational process, and 
are in fact the superficial symptoms of some 
deep-seated weakness of nerve, while their 
very absurdity, and the fact that the mind 
cannot throw them off, only prove how 
strong they are. They are, in fact, signs of 
some profound uneasiness of mind; and the 
rational brain of such people, casting about 
for some reason to explain the fear with 
which they are haunted, fixes on some detail 
which is not worthy of serious notice. It is, of 
course, a species of local insanity and mono- 
mania, but it does not imply any general 
obscuration of faculties at all. Some of the 
most intellectual people are most at the 
mercy of such trials, and indeed they are 
rather characteristic of men and women 



98 Where No Fear Was 

whose brain is apt to work at high pressure. 
One recollects in the life of Shelley, how he 
used to be haunted by these insupportable 
fears. He was at one time persuaded that 
he had contracted leprosy, and he used to 
disconcert his acquaintances by examining 
solicitously their wrists and necks to see if he 
could detect symptoms of the same disease. 
There is very little doubt that as medical 
knowledge progresses we shall know more 
about the cause of such hallucinations. To 
call them unreal is mere stupidity. Sensi- 
ble people who suffer from them are often 
perfectly well aware of their unreality, and 
are profoundly humiliated by them. They 
are some disease or weakness of the imagi- 
native faculty; and a friend of mine who 
suffered from such things told me that it was 
extraordinary to him to perceive the incredi- 
ble ingenuity with which his brain under 
such circumstances used to find confirmation 
for his fears from all sorts of trivial incidents 
which at other times passed quite unnoticed. 
It is generally quite useless to think of 



Fears of Age 99 

removing the fear by combating the parti- 
cular fancy; the affected centre, whatever it 
is, only turns feverishly to some other similar 
anxiety. Occupation of a quiet kind, exer- 
cise, rest, are the best medicine. 

Sometimes these anxieties take a different 
form, and betray themselves by suspicion of 
other people's conduct and motives. That 
is of course allied to insanity. In sane and 
sound health we realise that we are not, as a 
rule, the objects of the malignity and spite- 
fulness of others. We are perhaps obstacles 
to the carrying out of other people's plans, 
but men and women, as a rule, mind their own 
business, and are not much concerned to 
intervene in the designs and activities of 
others. But a man whose mental equilibri- 
um is unstable is apt to think that if he is 
disappointed or thwarted it is the result of a 
deliberate conspiracy on the part of other 
people. If he is a writer, he thinks that 
other writers are aware of his merits, but are 
determined to prevent them being recognised 
out of sheer ill-will. A man in robust health 



ioo Where No Fear Was 

realises that he gets quite as much credit or 
even more credit than he deserves, and that 
his claims to attention are generously recog- 
nised; one has exactly as much influence and 
weight as one can get, and other people, as a 
rule, are much too much occupied in their 
own concerns to have either the time or the 
inclination to intervene. But as a man grows 
older, as his work stiffens and weakens, he 
falls out of the race, and he must be content 
to do so ; and he is well advised if he puts his 
failure down to his own deficiencies, and not 
to the malice of others. The world is really 
very much on the look-out for anything 
which amuses, delights, impresses, moves, or 
helps it; it is quick and generous in recogni- 
tion of originality and force ; and if a writer, 
as he gets older, finds his books neglected and 
his opinions disdained, he may be fairly sure 
that he has said his say, and that men are pre- 
occupied with new ideas and new personali- 
ties. Of course, this is a melancholy and 
disconcerting business, especially if one has 
been more concerned with personal promin- 



Fears of Age 101 

ence than with the worth and weight of one's 
ideas; mortified vanity is a sore trial. I 
remember once meeting an old author who, 
some thirty years before the date at which I 
met him, had produced a book which at- 
tracted an extraordinary amount of atten- 
tion, though it has long since been forgotten. 
The old man had all the airs of solemn great- 
ness, and I have seldom seen a more rueful 
spectacle than when a young and rising 
author was introduced to him, and when 
it became obvious that the young man had 
not only never heard of the old writer, but 
did not know the name of his book. 

The question is what we can do to avoid 
falling under the dominion of these uncanny 
fears and fancies, as we fall from middle age 
to age. A dreary, dispirited, unhappy, 
peevish old man or old woman is a very 
miserable spectacle; while, at the same time, 
generous, courteous, patient, modest, tender 
old age is one of the most beautiful things in 
the world. We may of course resolve not to 
carry our dreariness into all circles, and if we 



102 Where No Fear Was 

find life a poor and dejected business, we can 
determine that we will not enlarge upon the 
theme. But the worst of discouragement is 
that it removes even the desire to play a 
part, or to make the most and best of our- 
selves. Like Mrs. Gummidge in David 
Copperfield, if we are reminded that other 
people have their troubles, we are apt to reply 
that we feel them more. One does not 
desire that people should unduly indulge 
themselves in self-dramatisation. There is 
something very repugnant in an elderly per- 
son who is bent on proving his importance 
and dignity, in laying claim to force and 
influence, in affecting to play a large part in 
the world. But there is something even more 
afflicting in the people who drop all decent 
pretence of dignity, and pour the product 
of an acrid and disappointed spirit into all 
conversations. 

Age can establish itself very firmly in the 
hearts of its circle, if it is kind, sympathetic, 
appreciative, ready to receive confidences, 
willing to encourage the fitful despondencies 



Fears of Age 103 

of youth. But here again we are met by 
the perennial difficulty as to how far we can 
force ourselves to do things which we do not 
really want to do, and how far again, if we 
succeed in forcing ourselves into action, we 
can give any accent of sincerity and genuine- 
ness to our comments and questions. 

In this particular matter, that of sym- 
pathy, a very little effort does undoubtedly 
go a long way, because there are a great 
many people in the world eagerly on the 
look-out for any sign of sympathy, and not 
apt to scrutinise too closely the character of 
the sympathy offered. And the best part 
of having once forced oneself to exhibit 
sympathy, at whatever cost of strain and 
effort, is that one is at least ashamed to 
withdraw it. 

I remember a foolish woman who was very 
anxious to retain the hold upon the active 
world which she had once possessed. She 
very seldom spoke of any subject but herself, 
her performances, her activities, the pressure 
of the claims which she was forced to try to 



104 Where No Fear Was 

satisfy. I can recall her now, with her 
sanguine complexion, her high voice, her 
anxious and restless eye wandering in search 
of admiration. "The day's post!" she cried, 
"that is one of my worst trials — so many 
duties to fulfil, so many requests for help, so 
many irresistible claims come before me in 
the pile of letters — that high," indicating 
about a foot and a half of linear measurement 
above the table. " It is the same story every 
day — a score of people bringing their little 
mugs of egotism to be filled at my pump of 
sympathy!" 

It was a ridiculous exhibition, because one 
was practically sure that there was nothing 
of the kind going on. One was inclined to 
believe that they were mugs of sympathy 
filled at the pump of egotism! But if the 
thing were really being done, it was certainly 
worth doing! 

One of the causes of the failure of nerve- 
force in age, which lies behind so much of 
these miseries, is that people who have lived 
at all active lives cannot bring themselves to 



Fears of Age 105 

realise their loss of vigour, and try to prolong 
the natural energies of middle age into the 
twilight of elderliness. Men and women cling 
to activities, not because they enjoy them, 
but to delude themselves into believing that 
they are still young. That terrible inability 
to resign positions, the duties of which one 
cannot adequately fulfil, which seems so dis- 
graceful and unconscientious a handling of 
life to the young, is often a pathetic clinging 
to youth. Such veterans do not reflect that 
the only effect of such tenacity is partly that 
other people do their work, and partly also 
that the critic observes that if a post can be 
adequately filled by so old a man it is a proof 
that such a post ought not to exist. The 
tendency ought to be met as far as possible 
by fixing age-limits to all positions. Because 
even if the old and weary do consult their 
friends as to the advisability of retirement, 
it is very hard for the friends cordially to 
recommend it. A public man once told me 
that a very aged official consulted him as to 
the propriety of resignation. He said in his 



106 Where No Fear Was 

reply something complimentary about the 
value of the veteran's services. Whereupon 
the old man replied that as he set so high an 
estimation upon his work, he would endeav- 
our to hold on a little longer ! 

The conscientious thing to do, as we get 
older and find ourselves slower, more timid, 
more inactive, more anxious, is to consult a 
candid friend, and to follow his advice rather 
than our own inclination; a certain fear- 
fulness, an avoidance of unpleasant duty, 
a dreary foreboding, is apt to be characteristic 
of age. But we must meet it philosophically. 
We must reflect that we have done our work, 
and that an attempt to galvanise ourselves 
into activity is sure to result in depression. 
So we must condense our energies, be content 
to play a little, to drowse a little, to watch 
with interest the game of life in which we 
cannot take a hand, until death falls as 
naturally upon our wearied eyes as sleep 
falls upon the eyes of a child tired with 
a long summer day of eager pleasure and 
delight. 



Fears of Age 107 

But there is one practical counsel that may 
here be given to all who find a tendency to 
dread and anxiety creeping upon them as life 
advances. I have known very truly and 
deeply religious people who have been thus 
beset, and who make their fears the subject 
of earnest prayer, asking that this particular 
terror may be spared them, that this cup may 
be withdrawn from their shuddering lips. I 
do not believe that this is the right way of 
meeting the situation. One may pray as 
whole-heartedly as one will against the tend- 
ency to fear; but it is a great help to realise 
that the very experiences which seem now so 
overwhelming had little or no effect upon one 
in youthful and high-hearted days. It is not 
really that the quality of events alters; it is 
merely that one is losing vitality, and parting 
with the irresponsible hopefulness that did 
not allow one to brood simply because there 
were so many other interesting and delightful 
things going on. 

One must attack the disease, for it is a 
disease, at the root; and it is of little use to 



108 Where No Fear Was 

shrink timidly from the particular evil, be- 
cause when it is gone another will take its 
place. We may pray for courage, but we 
must practise it ; and the best way of meeting 
particular fears is to cultivate interests, 
distractions, amusements, which may serve 
to dispel them. We cannot begin to do that 
while we are under the dominion of a par- 
ticular fear, for the strength of fear lies in its 
dominating and nauseating quality, so that it 
gives us a dreary disrelish for life; but if we 
really wish to combat it, we must beware of 
inactivity ; it may be comfortable, as life goes 
on, to cultivate a habit of mild contemplation, 
but it is this very habit of mind which pre- 
disposes us to anxiety when anxiety comes. 
Dr. Johnson pointed out how comparatively 
rare it was for people who had manual labour 
to perform, and whose work lay in the open 
air, to suffer from hypochondriacal terrors. 
The truth is that we are made for labour, 
and we have by no means got rid of the 
necessity for it. We have to pay a price for 
the comforts of civilisation, and above all for 



Fears of Age 109 

the pleasures of inactivity. It is astonishing 
how quickly a definite task which one has 
to perform, whether one likes it or not, draws 
off a cloud of anxiety from one's spirit. I 
am myself liable to attacks of depression, not 
causeless depression, but a despondent ex- 
aggeration of small troubles. Yet in times of 
full work, when meetings have to be attended, 
papers tackled, engagements kept, I seldom 
find myself suffering from vague anxieties. 
It is simply astonishing that one cannot learn 
more common sense! I suppose that all 
people of anxious minds tend to find the 
waking hour a trying one. The mind, 
refreshed by sleep, turns sorrowfully to the 
task of surveying the difficulties which lie 
before it. And yet a hundred times have I 
discovered that life, which seemed at dawn 
nothing but a tangle of intolerable problems, 
has become at noon a very bearable and even 
interesting affair; and one should thus learn 
to appreciate the tonic value of occupation, 
and set oneself to discern some pursuit, if 
we have no compulsory duties, which may set 



no Where No Fear Was 

the holy mill revolving, as Dante says; for it is 
the homely grumble of the gear which dis- 
tracts us from the other sort of grumbling, 
the self -pitying frame of mind, which is the 
most fertile seed-plot of fear. 

"How happy I was long ago; how little 
I guessed my happiness; how little I knew 
all that lay before me; how sadly and 
strangely afflicted I am!" These are the 
whispers of the evil demon of f earf ulness ; and 
they can be checked only by the murmur 
of wholesome and homely voices. 

The old motto says, "Orare est laborare, " 
"prayer is work" — and it is no less true that 
' ■ laborare est or are, " ' ' work is prayer. ' ' The 
truth is that we cannot do without both ; and 
when we have prayed for courage, and tried 
to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who are 
joyful in glory do, we had better spend no 
time in begging that money may be sent us to 
meet our particular need, or that health may 
return to us, or that this and that person 
may behave more kindly and considerately, 
but go our way to some perfectly common- 



Fears of Age in 

place bit of work, do it as thoroughly as we 
can, and simply turn our back upon the 
hobgoblin whose grimaces fill us with such 
uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed 
daylight over the volume or the account- 
book, in the simple talk about arrangements 
or affairs, and above all perhaps in trying to 
disentangle and relieve another's troubles 
and anxieties. We cannot get rid of fear by 
drugs or charms ; we have to turn to the work 
which is the appointed solace of man, and 
which is the reward rather than the penalty 
of life. 



XI 

DR. JOHNSON 

There is one great and notable instance in 
our annals which ought once and for all to 
dispose of the idea that there is anything 
weak or unmanly in finding fear a constant 
temptation, and that is the case of Dr. 
Johnson. Dr. Johnson holds his supreme 
station as the "figure" par excellence of 
English life for a number of reasons. His 
robustness, his wit, his reverence for estab- 
lished things, his secret piety, are all con- 
tributory causes ; but the chief of all causes is 
that the proportion in which these things 
were mixed is congenial to the British mind. 
The Englishman likes a man who is deeply 
serious without being in the least a prig; a 
man who is tender-hearted without being 
sentimental; he likes a rather combative 

112 



Dr. Johnson 113 

nature, and enjoys repartee more than he en- 
joys humour. The Englishman values good 
sense above almost all qualities ; by a sensible 
man he means a man with a clear judgment of 
right and wrong, a man who is not taken in 
by pretences nor gulled by rhetoric; a man 
who can instinctively see what is important 
and what is unimportant. But of course 
the chief external reason, apart from the 
character of Johnson himself, for his suprem- 
acy of fame, is that his memory is enshrined 
in an incomparable biography. It shows the 
strange ineptness of Englishmen for literary 
and artistic criticism, their incapacity for 
judging a work of art on its own merits, their 
singular habit of allowing their disapproba- 
tion of a man's private character to depreciate 
his work, that an acknowledged critic like 
Macaulay could waste time in carefully con- 
sidering whether Boswell was more fool or 
more knave, and triumphantly announce that 
he produced a good book by accident. Pro- 
bably Boswell did not realise how matchless 
a biographer he was, though he was not dis- 

8 



ii4 Where No Fear Was 

posed to belittle his own performances. But 
his unbridled interest in the smallest details, his 
power of hero-worship, his amazing style, 
his perception, his astonishing memory and 
the training he gave it, his superb dramatic 
faculty, which enabled him to arrange his 
other characters around the main figure, and 
to subordinate them all to his central em- 
phasis — all these qualities are undeniable. 
Moreover he was himself the most perfect 
foil and contrast to Johnson that could be 
imagined, while he possessed in a unique 
degree the power of both stimulating and 
provoking his hero to animation and to 
wrath. Boswell may not have known what 
an artist he was, but he is probably one of the 
best literary artists who has ever lived. 

But the supreme quality of his great book 
is this — that his interest in every trait of his 
hero, large and small, is so strong that he 
had none of that stiff propriety or chilly 
reserve which mars almost all English bio- 
graphies. He did not care a straw whether 
this characteristic or that would redound to 



Dr. Johnson 115 

Johnson's credit. He saw that Johnson was 
a large-minded, large-hearted man, with an 
astonishing power of conversational expres- 
sion, and an extremely picturesque figure 
as well. He perceived that he was big 
enough to be described in full, and that the 
shadows of his temperament only brought 
out the finer features into prominence. 

Since the days of Johnson there are but 
two Englishmen whose lives we know in any- 
thing like the small detail — Ruskin and Car- 
lyle. We know the life of Ruskin mainly 
from his own power of impassioned auto- 
biography, and because he had the same sort 
of power of exhibiting both his charm and his 
weakness as Boswell had in dealing with 
Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typi- 
cal Englishman; he had a very feminine side 
to his character, and though he was saved 
from sentimentality by his extreme trench- 
ancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his 
whole temperament is beautiful, winning, 
attractive, rather than salient and pictur- 
esque. He had the qualities of a poet, a 



n6 Where No Fear Was 

quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy ; but 
though his spell over those who understand 
him is an almost magical one, his point of 
view is bound to be misunderstood by the 
ordinary man. 

Carlyle's case is a different one again. 
There the evidence is mainly documentary. 
We know more about the Carlyle interior 
than we know of the history of any married 
pair since the world began. There is little 
doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Bos- 
well, a biographer who could have rendered 
the effect of his splendid power of conver- 
sation, we might have had a book which 
could have been put on the same level as the 
Life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was 
pre-eminently a figure, a man made by nature 
to hold the enraptured attention of a circle. 
But it would have been a much more difficult 
task to represent Carlyle's talk than it was to 
represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was an 
inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objec- 
tion and repartee out of his own mind. I 
think it probable that Carlyle was a typical 



Dr. Johnson 117 

Scotchman; he was more impassioned in his 
seriousness than Johnson, but he had a 
grimness which Johnson did not possess, and 
he had not Johnson's good-natured tolerance 
for foolish and well-meaning people. Carlyle 
himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, 
a power of minute and faithful observation 
and a memory which treasured and repro- 
duced characteristic details. If Carlyle had 
ever had the time or the taste to admire any 
human being as Boswell admired Johnson, he 
might have produced fully as great a book; 
but Carlyle had a prophetic impulse, an 
instinct for inverting tubs and preaching 
from them, a desire for telling the whole 
human race what to do and how to do 
it, which Johnson was too modest to 
claim. 

There is but one other instance that I know 
in English literature of a man who had the 
Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had 
complete scope, and that was Hogg. If 
Hogg could have spent more of his life with 
Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his 



n8 Where No Fear Was 

book, we might, I believe, have had a monu- 
ment of the same kind. 

But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it 
is Bos well's magnificent scorn of reticence 
which has done the trick, like the spurt of 
acid, of which Browning speaks in one of his 
best similes. The final stroke of genius 
which has established the Life of Johnson so 
securely in the hearts of English readers, lies 
in the fact that Boswell has given us some- 
thing to compassionate. As a rule, the 
biographer cannot bear to evoke the smallest 
pity for his hero. The absence of female 
relatives in the case of Johnson was probably 
a part of his good fortune. No biographer 
likes, and seldom dares, to torture the 
sensibilities of a great man's widow and 
daughters. And the strength as well as the 
weakness of the feminine point of view is that 
women have a power not so much of not 
observing, as of actually obliterating the 
weaknesses of those whom they love. It is 
sentiment which ruins biographies, the senti- 
ment that cannot bear the truth. 



Dr. Johnson 119 

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the 
reader to a sight of Johnson's hypochondria, 
his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his 
dread of illness, his terror of death. John- 
son's horror of annihilation was insupport- 
able. He so revelled in life, in the contact 
and company of other human beings, that he 
once said that the idea of an infinity of tor- 
ment was preferable to the thought of annihi- 
lation. He wrote, in his last illness, to his old 
friend Dr. Taylor: 

"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is 
very dreadful. I am afraid to think on that 
which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to 
look round and round for that help which 
cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, and 
fancy that he who has lived to-day may live 
to-morrow. But let us learn to derive our 
hope only from God. 

"In the meantime, let us be kind to one 
another. I have no friend now living but 
you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of 
my youth. — Do not neglect, sir, yours 
affectionately, Sam. Johnson. " 



120 Where No Fear Was 

Was ever the last fear put into such simple 
and poignant words as in the above letter? 
It is like that other saying of Johnson's, when 
all sorts of good reasons had been given why 
men should wish to be released from their 
troubles by death, " After all, it is a sad thing 
for a man to lie down and die. " There is no 
more that can be said, and not the best 
reasons in the world for desiring to depart and 
have done with life can ever do away with 
that sadness. 

Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if 
proof were needed, that no robustness of tem- 
perament, no genius of common-sense, no 
array of rationality, no degree of courage, can 
save a man from the assaults of fear, and 
even of fear which the sufferer knows to be 
unreal. Some of the most severe and angry 
things which Johnson ever said were said to 
Boswell and others who persisted in discus- 
sing the question of death. Yet Johnson 
had no rational doubt of immortality, and 
believed with an almost childlike simplicity in 
the Christian faith. He was not afraid of 



Dr. Johnson 121 

pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the 
unknown conditions beyond the grave that 
he was afraid. Probably, as a rule, very 
robust people are so much occupied in living 
that they have little time to think of the 
future, while men and women who hold to 
life by a frail tenure are not much concerned 
at quitting a scene which is phantasmal 
and full of pain. But in Johnson we have 
the two extremes brought together. He 
was the most gregarious of men; he loved 
company so well that he would follow his 
friends to the very threshold, in the hope, 
as he once told Boswell, that they might 
perhaps return. When he was alone and 
undistracted, his melancholy came back 
upon him like a cloud. He tortured himself 
over the unprofitableness of his life, over his 
failure to achieve official greatness. He does 
not seem to have brooded over the favourite 
subject for Englishmen to lose heart over, 
namely, his financial position. It is a very 
significant fact in our English life that if at 
an inquest over a suicide it can be established 



122 Where No Fear Was 

that a man has financial difficulties, a verdict 
of temporary insanity is instantly conceded. 
Loss of property rather than loss of affection 
is the thing which the Englishman thinks is 
likely to derange a man. But Johnson seems 
never to have been afraid of poverty, nor 
to have ever troubled about fame. He was 
very angry once when it was laughingly 
suggested to him that if he had gone to the 
Bar he might have been Lord Chancellor; 
and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one 
of his uncomfortable reflections was that he 
did not seem to himself to be in a position of 
influence and authority. But, apart from 
that, it is obvious that Johnson's broodings 
took the form of lamenting his own sinful- 
ness and moral worthlessness : what the 
faults which troubled him were, it is hard to 
say. He does not seem to have been repent- 
ant about the mortification he caused others 
by his witty bludgeoning — indeed he con- 
sidered himself a polite man ! But I believe, 
from many slight indications, that Johnson 
was distressed by the consciousness of sensual 



Dr. Johnson 123 

impulses, though he held them in severe 
restraint. His habit of ejaculatory prayer 
was, I think, directed against this tendency. 
The agitation with which he once said that 
corruption had entered into his heart by 
means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. 
He took a tolerant view of the lapses of 
others, and of course the standard of the age 
was lax in this respect. But I have little 
doubt myself that here Johnson found him- 
self often confronted with a sensuous tend- 
ency which he thought degrading, and 
which he constantly combated. 

Apart from this, he was not afraid of 
illness in itself, except as a prelude of mor- 
tality. Indeed I believe that he took a 
hypochondriac pleasure in observing his 
symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself 
in all sorts of ways. His mysterious pre- 
occupations with dried orange-peel had no 
doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it 
came to suffering pain and even to enduring 
operations, he had no tremors. His one con- 
stant fear was the fear of death. He kept it 



124 Where No Fear Was 

at arm's length, he loved any social amuse- 
ment that banished it, but it is obvious, in 
several of his talks, when the subject was 
under discussion, that the cloud descended 
upon him suddenly and made him miserable. 
It was all summed up in this, that life was to 
his taste, that even when oppressed with 
gloom and depression he never desired to 
escape. I have heard a great doctor say that 
he believed that human beings were very 
sharply divided in this respect, that there 
were some people in whom any extremity of 
prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never 
produced the smallest desire to quit life; 
while there were others whose attachment to 
life was slight, and that a very little pressure 
of care or calamity developed a suicidal 
impulse. This is, I suppose, a question 
of vitality, not necessarily of activity of 
mind and body, but a deep instinctive 
desire to live; the thought of deliberate 
suicide was wholly unintelligible to Johnson, 
death was his ultimate fear, and how- 
ever much he suffered from disease or 



Dr. Johnson 125 

depression, his intention to live was always 
inalienable. 

His fear then was one which no devoutness 
of faith, no resolute tenacity of hope, no array 
of reasons could ever touch. It was simply 
the unknown that he feared. Life had not 
been an easy business for Johnson; he had 
known all the calamities of life, and he was 
familiar with the worst calamity of all, the 
causeless melancholy which makes life weary 
and distasteful without ever removing the 
certainty that it is in itself desirable. 

We may see from all this that to attempt 
to seek a cure for fear in reason is foredoomed 
to failure, because fear lies in a region that is 
behind all reason. It exists in the depth of 
the spirit, as in the fallen gloom of the 
glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched 
by no activity of life and joy and sunlight 
on the surface, where the speeding sail moves 
past haze-hung headlands. We must follow 
it into those depths if we are to deal with it at 
all, and it must be vanquished in the region 
where it is born, and where it skulks unseen. 



XII 

TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE 

There were three great men of the nineteenth 
century of whom we know more than we 
know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and 
Tennyson, in whose lives fear was a prominent 
element. 

Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but 
he has suffered of late a certain loss of influ- 
ence, which was bound to come, if simply 
from the tremendous domination which his 
writings exercised in his lifetime. He was 
undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who 
ever lived and wrote, but he was a great 
deal more than that ; he was a great mystic, a 
man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of 
inspiration. He had the constitution and the 
temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, 

with that simple rusticity that is said to have 

126 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 127 

characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt 
apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, 
brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said 
to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was 
typical of his age, but because he contributed 
so much to make it what it was. While 
Browning lived an eager personal life, full of 
observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson 
abode in more impersonal thoughts. In the 
dawn of science, when there was a danger of 
life becoming over-materialised, contented 
with the first steps of swiftly apprehended 
knowledge, and with solutions which were no 
solutions at all, but only the perception of 
laws, Tennyson was the man of all others who 
saw that science had a deeply poetical side, 
and could enforce rather than destroy the 
religious spirit; he saw that a knowledge of 
processes was not the same thing as an 
explanation of impulses, and that while it was 
a little more clear in the light of science what 
was actually happening in the world, men were 
no nearer the perception of why it happened 
so, or why it happened at all. Tennyson saw 



128 Where No Fear Was 

clearly the wonders of astronomy and geo- 
logy* and discerned that the laws of nature 
were nothing more than the habits, so to 
speak, of a power that was incredibly dim and 
vast, a power which held within itself the 
secrets of motion and rest, of death and life. 
Thus he claimed for his disciples not only 
the average thoughtful man, but the very 
best and finest minds of his generation who 
wished to link the past and the present 
together, and not to break with the did 
sanctities. 

Tennyson's art suffered from the conscious- 
ness of his enormous responsibility, and where 
he failed was from his dread of unpopularity, 
and his fear of alienating the ordinary man. 
Browning was interested in ethical pro- 
blems ; his robust and fortunate temperament 
allowed him to bridge over with a sort of 
buoyant healthiness the gaps of his philo- 
sophy. But Tennyson's ethical failure lay in 
his desire to improve the occasion, and to rule 
out all impulses that had not a social and 
civic value. In the later Idylls, he did 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 129 

his best to represent the prig trailing clouds 
of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in 
every form; but he was more familiar with 
the darker and grosser sides of life than he 
allowed to appear in his verse, which surfers 
from an almost prudish delicacy, which is 
more akin to respectability than to moral 
courage. 

But all this was the shadow of a very sen- 
sitive and melancholy temperament. Com- 
paratively little is known of the first forty 
years of his life; it is after that time that the 
elaborate legend begins. Till the time of his 
marriage, he must have been a constant anxi- 
ety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his 
drifting, mooning ways, his hypochondria, 
his incapacity for any settled plan of life, 
all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. 
But this troubled inertness was the soil of his 
inspiration; his conceptions took slow and 
stately shape. He never suffered from the 
haste which, as Dante says, "mars all decency 
of act. " After that time, he enjoyed a great 
domestic happiness, and practised consider- 



130 Where No Fear Was 

able sociability. His terrifying demeanour, 
his amazing personal dignity and majesty, 
the certainty that he would say whatever 
came into his head, whether it was profound 
and solemn, or testy and discourteous, gave 
him a personal ascendancy that never dis- 
appointed a pilgrim. 

But he lived all his life in a perpetual 
melancholy, feeling the smallest slights 
acutely, hating at once obscurity and public- 
ity, aware of his renown, yet shrinking from 
the evidences of it. He could be distracted 
by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; 
but left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down 
the dark slope into a sadness and a dreariness 
which deprived life of its savour. It was 
not that his dread was a definite one ; he was 
strong and tough physically, and he regarded 
death with a solemn curiosity; but he had a 
sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, 
unthrilled by beauty and delight, and he had 
a morbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which 
caused him to resent the smallest criticism of 
his works from the humblest reader. There 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 131 

are many stories of this, how he declaimed 
against the lust of gossip, which he called, 
with rough appositeness, "ripping up a man 
like a pig," and thanked God with all his 
heart and soul that he knew nothing of 
Shakespeare's private life, and in the same 
breath went on to say that he thought that his 
own fame was suffering from a sort of con- 
gestion, because he had received no letters 
about his poems for several days. 

In later life, he became very pessimistic, 
and believed that the world was sinking fast 
into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and 
moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of 
knowing what was going on in the world than 
most people, in his sheltered and secluded 
life, with his court of friends and worshippers. 
And indeed it was not a rational pessimism; 
it was but the shadow of his fear. And the 
fact remains that in spite of a life of great 
good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy 
of fame, he spent much of his time in fighting 
shadows, involved in clouds of darkness 
and dissatisfaction. That was no doubt the 



132 Where No Fear Was 

price he paid for his exquisite perception of 
beauty and his power of melodious expression. 
But we make a great mistake if we merely 
think of Tennyson as a rich and ample 
nature moving serenely through life. He was 
11 black-blooded,' ' he once said, adding, "like 
all the Tennysons. " Doubtless he had in 
his mind his father, a man often deeply in 
the grip of melancholy. And the absurd 
legend, invented probably by Rossetti, con- 
tains a truth in it and may be quoted here. 
Rossetti said that he once went to dine 
with a friend in London, and was shown into 
a dimly lit drawing-room with no one to 
receive him. He went towards the fireplace, 
and suddenly to his surprise discovered an 
immensely tall man in evening dress lying 
prostrate on the hearthrug, his face down- 
wards, in an attitude of prone despair. 
While he gazed, the stranger rose to his feet, 
looked fixedly at him, and said, "I must 
introduce myself; I am Octavius, the most 
morbid of the Tennysons. " 

With Ruskin we have a different case. He 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 133 

was brought up in the most secluded fashion, 
and though he was sharply enough disciplined 
into decorous behaviour by his very grim and 
positive mother, he was guarded like a pre- 
cious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly 
petted and indulged. The Ruskins lived a 
very comfortable life in a big villa with 
ample grounds at Denmark Hill. What- 
ever the wonderful boy did was applauded 
and even dangerously encouraged, both in the 
way of drawing and of writing. Though he 
seems to have often been publicly snubbed 
by both his parents, it was more a family 
custom than anything else, and was accom- 
panied by undisguised admiration and patent 
pride. They were his stupefied critics, when 
he read aloud his works in the family circle, 
and his father obediently produced large sums 
of money to gratify his brilliant son's artistic 
desire for the possession of Turner's paintings. 
Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, 
turned fiercely and unjustly against his fond 
and tender father. He accused him with an 
intemperate bitterness of having lavished 



134 Where No Fear Was 

everything upon him except the intelligent 
sympathy of which he stood in need, and 
his father's gentle and mournful apologies 
have an extraordinary beauty of puzzled 
and patient dignity about them. 

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother 
went to reside there, too, to look after her 
darling. One might have supposed that this 
would have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but 
he was petted and indulged by his fellow- 
undergraduates, who found his charm, his 
swift wit, his childlike waywardness, his 
freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a 
serious illness, and his first taste of misery; 
he was afraid of death, he hated the con- 
straints of invalid life and the grim interrup- 
tion to his boundless energies and plans. 
Then came his first great book, and he 
strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing 
attractiveness, his talk, which combined 
incisiveness and fancy and humour and fire 
and gentleness, made him a marked figure 
from the first. Moreover, he had the 
command of great wealth, yet no temptation 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 135 

to be idle. The tale of Ruskin's industry 
for the next fifty years is one that would 
be incredible if it were not true. His brief 
and dim experience of married life seems 
hardly to have affected him. As a critic 
of art and ethics, as the writer of facile 
magnificent sentences, full of beauty and 
rhythm, as the composer of word-structures, 
apparently logical in form, but deeply pre- 
judiced and inconsequent in thought, he 
became one of the great influences of the 
day, and wielded not only power, but real 
domination. The widespread delusion of 
the English educated classes, that they are 
interested in art, was of Ruskin' s making. 
Then something very serious happened to 
him; a baffled passion of extraordinary 
intensity, a perception of the realities of 
life, the consciousness that his public in- 
dulged and humoured him as his parents had 
done, and admired his artistic advice without 
paying the smallest heed to his ethical prin- 
ciples — all these experiences broke over him, 
wearied as he was with excessive strain, like 



136 Where No Fear Was 

a bitter wave. But his pessimism took the 
noble form of an intense concern over the 
blindness and impenetrability of the world 
at large. He made a theory of political 
economy, which, peremptory and prejudiced 
as it is, is yet built on large lines, and has 
been fruitful in suggestiveness. But he 
tasted discouragement and failure in deep 
draughts. His parents frankly expressed 
their bewildered disappointment, his public 
looked upon him as a perverse man who was 
throwing away a beautiful message for the 
sake of a crabbed whim; and he fell into a 
fierce depression, alternating between savage 
energy and listless despondency, which 
lasted for several years, till at last the over- 
wrought brain and mind gave way; and for 
the rest of his life he was liable to recurrent 
attacks of insanity, which cleared off and 
left him normal again, or as normal as he 
ever had been. Wide and eager as Ruskin's 
tenderness was, one feels that his heart was 
never really engaged; he was always far 
away, in a solitude full of fear, out of the 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 137 

reach of affection, always solemnly and mourn- 
fully alone. Ruskin was never really allied 
with any other human soul ; he knew most of 
the great men of the day ; he baited Rossetti, 
he petted Carlyle; he had correspondents 
like Norton, to whom he poured out his over- 
burdened heart ; but he was always the petted 
and indulged child of his boyhood, infinitely 
winning, provoking, wilful. He could not be 
helped, because he could never get away from 
himself; he could admire almost frenziedly, 
but he could not worship; he could not keep 
himself from criticism even when he adored, 
and he had a bitter superiority of spirit, a 
terrible perception of the imperfections and 
faults of others, a real despair of humanity. 
I do not know exactly what the terrors 
which Ruskin suffered were — very few people 
will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or 
probably cannot! In the Pilgrim? s Progress 
itself, the unreality of the spirits of fear, their 
secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wit- 
tily told. They scream in their dens, sitting 
together, I have thought, like fowls in a 



138 Where No Fear Was 

roost. They come padding after the Pilgrim, 
they show themselves obscurely, swollen by 
the mist at the corners of the road. They 
give the sense of being banded together in a 
numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and 
ear, and even nose, with noisome stenches; 
but they cannot show themselves, and they 
cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they 
would be nothing but limp ungainly things 
that would rouse disdain and laughter and 
even pity, at anything at once so weak and 
so malevolent. But they are not like the 
demons of sin that can hamper and wound; 
they are just little gnomes and elves that can 
make a noise, and their strength is a spiteful 
and a puny thing. 

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he 
had no fear of poverty, for he flung his 
father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; 
nor did he fear illness; indeed one of the 
bravest and most gallant things about him 
was the way in which he talked and wrote 
about his insane fits, described his haunted 
visions, told, half -ruefully, half-humorously, 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 139 

how he fought and struggled with his nurses, 
and made fun of the matter. That was a 
very courageous thing to do, because most 
people are ashamed of insanity, no doubt 
from the old sad ignorant tradition that it 
was the work of demoniacal agencies, and 
not a mere disease like other diseases. Half 
the tragedy of insanity is that it shocks 
people, and cannot be alluded to or spoken 
about; but one can take the sting out of 
almost any calamity if one can make fun of 
it, and this Ruskin did. 

But he was wounded by his fears, as we 
most of us are, not only through his vanity 
but through his finest emotions. He felt 
his impotence and his failure. He had 
thought of his gift of language as one might 
think of a magic wand which one can wave, 
and thus compel duller spirits to do one's 
bidding. Ruskin began by thinking that 
there was not much amiss with the world 
except a sort of pathetic stupidity; and he 
thought that if only people could be told, 
clearly and loudly enough, what was right, 



140 Where No Fear Was 

they would do it gladly; and then it dawned 
upon him by slow degrees that the confusion 
was far deeper than that, that men mostly 
did not live in motives but in appetites. 
And so he fell into a sort of noble rage with 
the imperfection of mortal things; and one 
of the clearest signs, as he himself knew, 
that he was drifting into one of the mind- 
storms which swept across him, was that 
in these moods everything that people said 
or wrote had power to arouse his irritation, to 
interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and 
to show him that he was powerless indeed. 
What he feared was derision, and the good- 
natured indifferent stolidity that is worse 
than any derision, and the knowledge that, 
with all his powers and perceptions, his 
common-sense, which was great, and his 
sense of responsibility, he was treated by 
the world like a spoilt child, charming even 
in his wrath, who had full licence to be as 
vehement as he liked, with the understanding 
that no one would act on his advice. 

I often go to Br ant wood, which is a sacred 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 141 

place indeed, and see with deep emotion the 
little rooms, with all their beautiful treasures 
and all the great accumulations of that fierce 
industry of mind, and remember that in 
that peaceful background a man of exquisite 
genius fought with sinister shadows, and was 
worsted in the fight, for a time; because the 
last ten years of that long life were a time 
of serene waiting for death, a beguiling by 
little childish and homely occupations the 
heavy hours: he could uplift his voice no 
more, often could hardly frame an intelligible 
thought. But, meanwhile, his great message 
went on rippling out to the world, touching 
heart after heart into light and hope, and 
doing, insensibly and graciously, by the 
spirit, the very thing he had failed to do 
by might and power. 

And then we come to Carlyle, and here we 
are on somewhat different ground. Carlyle 
had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he 
thought very little of the message of beauty 
and peace. His idea of life was that of a 
stern combative place, with the one hope in a 



142 Where No Fear Was 

strenuous and grim righteousness; Carlyle 
thought of the world as a place where cheats 
and liars cozened and beguiled men, for their 
own advantage, with all sorts of shams and 
pretences: but he did not really know the 
world; he put down to individual action and 
deliberate policy much that was due simply 
to the prevalence of tradition and system, 
and to the complexity of civilisation. He 
was so fierce an individualist himself that 
he credited everyone else with purpose and 
prejudice. He did not realise the vast 
preponderance of helpless good-nature and 
muddled kindliness. The mistake of much 
of Carlyle' s work is that it is too poignantly 
dramatic, and bristles with intention and 
significance ; and he did not allow sufficiently 
for the crowd of vague supers who throng 
the background of the stage. Neither did 
he ever go about the world with his eyes 
open for general facts. Wherever he was, 
he was intensely observant, but he spent his 
days either in a fierce absorption of work, 
blind even to the sorrow and discomfort 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 143 

of his wife, or taking rapid tours to store his 
mind with the details of historical scenes, or 
in the big houses of wealthy people, where 
he kept much to himself, stored up irre- 
sistibly absurd caricatures of the other guests, 
and lamented his own inaction. I have never 
been able to discover 'exactly why Carlyle 
spent so much time in staying at great houses, 
deriding and satirising everything he set eyes 
upon; it was, I believe, vaguely gratifying to 
him to have raised himself unaided into the 
highest social stratum; and the old man was 
after all a tremendous aristocrat at heart. 
Or else he skulked with infinite melancholy 
in his mother's house, being waited upon and 
humoured, and indulging his deep and true 
family affection. But he was a solitary man 
for the most part, and mixed with men, 
involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly 
fantastic and whimsical talk; for his real 
gift was half -humorous, half -melancholy im- 
provisation rather than deliberate writing. 

But it is difficult to discern in all this what 
his endless and plangent melancholy was 



144 Where No Fear Was 

concerned with. He had a very singular 
physical frame, immensely tough and wiry, 
with an imagination which emphasised and 
particularised every slight touch of bodily 
disorder. When he was at work, he worked 
like a demon day after day, entirely and 
vehemently absorbed. When he was not at 
work he suffered from dreary reaction. He 
fought out in early days a severe moral com- 
bat, and found his way to a belief in God 
which was very different from his early 
Calvinism. Carlyle can by no stretch of the 
word be called a Christian, but he was one 
of the most thoroughgoing Deists that ever 
lived. The terror that beset him in that 
first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his 
own insignificance, and a horrible suspicion 
that the world was made on fortuitous 
and indifferent lines. His dread was that of 
being worsted, in spite of all his eager sen- 
sibility and immense desire to do a noble 
work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruth- 
lessly on the dust-heap of the world. He 
learned a fiery sort of Determinism, and a 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 145 

faith in the stubborn power of the will, not 
to achieve anything but to achieve something. 
Yet after this tremendous conflict, de- 
scribed in Sartor Resartus, where he found 
himself at bay with his back to the wall, he 
never had any ultimate doubt again of his 
own purpose. Still, it brought him no 
serenity; and I suppose there is no writer 
in the world whose letters and diaries are 
so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. 
He was crushed under the sense of the 
world's immensity; his own observation was 
so microscopic, his desire to perceive and 
know so strong, his appetite for definiteness 
so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror 
was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, 
longing to explore it all, lost in the high- 
flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale of 
mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain 
that wanted to know the truth about every- 
thing. In these sad hours, — and they were 
numerous and protracted, — he felt like a 
knight worn out by conflict, under a listless 
enchantment which he could not break. I 

10 



146 Where No Fear Was 

know few confessions that are so filled with 
gleams of high poetry and beauty as many of 
these solitary lamentations. But I believe 
that the terrors that Carlyle had to face were 
the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly 
active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal 
weakness and frailty from dealing as he 
desired with the dazzling immensity and 
intricacy of the world's life and history. 

I feel no real doubt of this, because 
Carlyle' s passion for accurate and minute 
knowledge, his intense interest in tempera- 
ment and character, his almost unequalled 
power of observation — which is really the 
surest sign of genius — come out so clearly 
all through his life, that his finite limitations 
must have been of the nature of a torture to 
him. One who desired to know the truth 
about everything so vehemently, was crushed 
and bewildered by the narrow range and 
limited scope of his own insatiable thought. 
His power of expressing all that he saw and 
felt, so delicately, so humorously, and at 
times so tenderly, must have beguiled his 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle 147 

sadness more than he knew. It was Ruskin 
who said that he could never fit the two sides 
of the puzzle together — on the one side 
the awful dejection and despondency which 
Carlyle always claimed to feel in the presence 
of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and 
as a sorter of mountains of rubbish, and 
on the other side the endless relish for salient 
traits, and the delighted apprehension of 
quality which emerges so clearly in all he 
wrote. 

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered cease- 
lessly, though never unutterably. He was a 
matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of 
putting into vivid words everything he expe- 
rienced; but his sadness was a disease of the 
imagination, a fear, not of anything definite — 
for he never even saw the anxieties that were 
nearest to him — but a nightmare dream of 
chaos and whirling forces all about him, a 
dread of slipping off his own very fairly 
comfortable perch into oceans of confusion 
and dismay. 



XIII 

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

I doubt if the records of intimate bio- 
graphy contain a finer object-lesson against 
fear and all its obsessions than the life of 
Charlotte Bronte. She was of a tempera- 
ment which in many ways was more open to 
the assaults of fear than any which could 
well be devised. She was frail and delicate, 
liable to acute nervous depression, intensely 
shy and sensitive, and susceptible as well; 
that is to say, that her shyness did not iso- 
late her from her kind; she wanted to be 
loved, respected, even admired. When she 
did love, she loved with fire and passion and 
desperate loyalty. 

Her life was from beginning to end full of 
sharp and tragic experiences. She was born 

and brought up in a bleak moorland village, 

148 



Charlotte Bronte 149 

climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of 
heathery uplands. The bare parsonage, with 
its little dark rooms, looks out on a church- 
yard paved with graves. Her father was a 
kindly man, but essentially moody and soli- 
tary. He took all his meals alone, walked 
alone, sat alone. Her mother died of cancer, 
when she was but a child. Then she was 
sent to an ill-managed, austere school, and 
here, when she was nine years old, her two 
elder sisters died. She took service two or 
three times as a governess, and endured 
agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of 
her employers, afraid of her pupils, longing 
for home with an intense yearning. Then 
she went out to a school at Brussels, where 
under the teaching of M. Heger, a gifted 
professor, her mind and heart awoke, and 
she formed for him a strange affection, half 
an intellectual devotion, half an unconscious 
passion, which deprived her of her peace 
of mind. Her sad and wistful letters to 
him, lately published, were disregarded t>y 
him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly 



150 Where No Fear Was 

jealous of the relation, partly because he was 
disconcerted by the emotion he had aroused. 
Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and, in 
some ways, attractive boy, got into disgrace, 
and drifted home, where he tried to console 
himself with drink and opium. After three 
years of this horrible life, he died, and within 
twelve months her two surviving sisters, 
Emily and Anne, developed consumption 
and died. As Robert Browning says, there 
indeed was "trouble enough for one!" 

Now it must be borne in mind that her 
temperament was naturally hypochondriacal. 

Let me quote a passage dealing with the 
same experience; it is undoubtedly autobio- 
graphical, though it comes from Villette, into 
which Charlotte Bronte threw the picture 
of her own solitary experiences in Brussels. 
She is left alone at the pensionnat in the 
vacation, strained by work and anxiety, and 
tortured by exhaustion, restlessness, and 
sleeplessness : 

"One day, perceiving this growing illu- 
sion, I said, 'I really believe my nerves are 



Charlotte Bronte 151 

getting overstretched: my mind has suffered 
somewhat too much; a malady is growing 
upon it — what shall I do? How shall I keep 
well?' 

"Indeed there was no way to keep well 
under the circumstances. At last a day and 
night of peculiarly agonising depression were 
succeeded by physical illness ; I took perforce 
to my bed. About this time the Indian 
summer closed, and the equinoctial storms 
began; and for nine dark and wet days, of 
which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf, 
dishevelled — bewildered with sounding hurri- 
cane — I lay in a strange fever of the nerves 
and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used 
to rise in the night, look round for her, 
beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle 
of the window, a cry of the blast only re- 
plied — Sleep never came ! 

11 1 err. She came once, but in anger. Im- 
patient of my importunity she brought with 
her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. 
Jean Baptiste, that dream remained scarce 
fifteen minutes — a brief space, but sufficing 



152 Where No Fear Was 

to wring my whole frame with unknown 
anguish; to confer a nameless experience 
that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the 
very tone of a visitation from eternity. 
Between twelve and one that night a cup 
was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, 
drawn from no well, but filled up seething 
from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffer- 
ing, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, 
and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this 
suffering tasted. Having drank and woke, 
I thought all was over: the end come and 
passed by. Trembling fearfully — as con- 
sciousness returned — ready to cry out on 
some fellow-creature to help me, only that I 
knew no fellow-creature was near enough to 
catch the wild summons — Goton in her far 
distant attic could not hear — I rose on my 
knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over 
me; indescribably was I torn, racked and op- 
pressed in mind. Amidst the horrors of that 
dream I think the worst lay here. Me- 
thought the well-loved dead, who had loved 
me well in life, met me elsewhere alienated; 



Charlotte Bronte 153 

galled was my inmost spirit with an unutter- 
able sense of despair about the future. Mo- 
tive there was none why I should try to 
recover or wish to live; and yet quite un- 
endurable was the pitiless and haughty voice 
in which Death challenged me to engage his 
unknown terrors. When I tried to pray 
I could only utter these words: — 

"'From my youth up Thy terrors have I 
suffered with a troubled mind.' " 

The deep interest of this experience is that 
it was endured by one who was not only in- 
tellectually endowed beyond most women of 
her time, but whose sanity, reasonableness, 
and moral force were conspicuously strong. 
Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impul- 
sive and imaginative women who are the 
prey of every fancy. Throughout the whole 
of her career, she was for ever compelling her 
frail and sensitive temperament with indomi- 
table purpose, to perform whatever she had 
undertaken to do. There never was anyone 
who lived so sternly by principle and reason, 
or who so maintained her self-control in the 



154 Where No Fear Was 

face of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and 
bereavement. Borrow had undoubtedly a 
strong vein of melancholy and eccentricity 
in him, but that Charlotte Bronte should thus 
suffer is a sign that this unnamed terror 
can coexist with a dauntless courage and an 
essential self-command. 

Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! 
She had been going through her sisters' 
papers not long after their death, and wrote 
to her great friend: "I am both angry and 
surprised at myself for not being in better 
spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at 
least resigned, to the solitude and isolation 
of my lot. But my late occupation left a 
result, for some days and indeed still, very 
painful. The reading over of papers, the 
renewal of remembrances, brought back the 
pangs of bereavement and occasioned a 
depression of spirits well-nigh intolerable. 
For one or two nights I hardly knew how to 
get on till morning; and when morning 
came I was still haunted by a sense of sicken- 
ing distress. I tell you these things because 



Charlotte Bronte 155 

it is absolutely necessary to me to have some 
relief. You will forgive me and not trouble 
yourself, or imagine that I am one whit 
worse than I say. It is quite a mental ail- 
ment, and I believe and hope is better now. 
I think so, because I can speak about it, 
which I never can when grief is at its worst. 
I thought to find occupation and interest in 
writing when alone at home, but hitherto 
my efforts have been in vain: the deficiency 
of every stimulus is so complete. You will 
recommend me, I dare say, to go from home; 
but that does no good, even could I again 
leave papa with an easy mind. ... I can- 
not describe what a time of it I had after 
my return from London and Scotland. 
There was a reaction that sank me to the 
earth, the deadly silence, solitude, depression, 
desolation were awful; the craving for com- 
panionship, the hopelessness of relief were 
what I should dread to feel again." Or 
again, in a somewhat calmer mood, she writes : 
11 1 feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, 
that it is not in my power to bear the canker 



156 Where No Fear Was 

of constant solitude. I had calculated that 
when shut out from every enjoyment, from 
every stimulus but what could be desired 
from intellectual exertion, my mind would 
rouse itself perforce. It is not so. Even 
intellect, even imagination will not dispense 
with the ray of domestic cheerfulness, with 
the gentle spur of family discussions. Late 
in the evening and all through the nights, I 
fall into a condition of mind which turns 
entirely to the past — to memory, and memory 
is both sad and relentless. This will never 
do, and will produce no good. I tell you this 
that you may check false anticipations. You 
cannot help me, and must not trouble your- 
self in any shape to sympathise with me. 
It is my cup, and I must drink it as others 
do theirs." 

It would be difficult to create a picture of 
more poignant suffering; yet she was at this 
time a famous writer. She had published 
Jane Eyre and Shirley, and on her visits to 
London, to her hospitable publisher, had 
found herself welcomed, honoured, feted. 



Charlotte Bronte 157 

The great lions of the literary world had 
flocked eagerly to meet her. Even these 
simple festivities were accompanied by a 
deadly sense of strain, anxiety, and exhaus- 
tion. Mrs. Gaskell describes how a little 
later she met Charlotte Bronte at a quiet 
country-house, and how Charlotte was re- 
duced from tolerable health to a bad ner- 
vous headache by the announcement that 
they were going to drive over in the afternoon 
to have tea at a neighbour's house — the pro- 
spect of meeting strangers was so alarming 
to her. 

But in spite of this agonising susceptibility 
and vulnerability, there is never the least 
touch either of sentimentality or self-pity 
about Charlotte Bronte. She stuck to her 
duty and faced life with an infinity of patient 
courage. One of her friends said of her that 
no one she had ever known had sacrificed 
more to others, or done it with a fuller con- 
sciousness of what she was sacrificing. If 
duty and affection bade her act, no sense of 
weakness or of inclination had any power over 



158 Where No Fear Was 

her. She was afraid of life, but she stood 
up to it; she was never crushed or broken. 
Consider the circumstances under which she 
began to write Jane Eyre. She had written 
her novel The Professor and it was returned 
to her nine several times, by publisher after 
publisher. Her father was threatened with 
blindness. She had taken him to Manchester 
for an operation, installed him in lodgings, 
and settled down alone to nurse him. The 
ill-fated Professor came back to her once 
more with a polite refusal. That very day 
she wrote the first lines of Jane Eyre. Later 
on too, with her brother dying of opium and 
drink, she had begun Shirley, and she fin- 
ished it after the death of her sisters. She 
was perfectly merciless to herself, saw no 
reason why she should be spared any sorrow 
or suffering or ill-health, but looked upon it all 
as a stern but not unjust discipline. She 
had one of the most passionately affectionate 
natures both in friendship and home rela- 
tions — "my hot tenacious heart," she once 
says! But there was no touch of softness or 



Charlotte Bronte 159 

sentimentality about her; she never feebly 
condoned weaknesses; her observation of 
people was minute, her judgment of them 
severe and even satirical. Her letters abound 
in pungent humour and acute perception; 
and her idea of charity was not that of mild 
and muddled tolerance. She had a vein of 
frank and rather bitter irony when she was 
indignant, and she could return stroke for 
stroke. 

She knew well that whatever life was meant 
to be, it was not intended to be an easy 
business; but she did not face it stoically or 
indifferently ; she had a fierce desire for know- 
ledge, culture, ideas; she was ambitious; and 
above everything she desired to be loved; 
yet she did not think of love in the way in 
which all English romancers had treated it 
for over a century, as a condescending hand 
held out by a superior being, for the glory 
of which a woman submitted to a more or 
less contented servitude; but as a glowing 
equality of passion and worship, in which two 
hearts clasped each other close, with a sacred 



160 Where No Fear Was 

concurrence of soul. And thus it was that 
she and Robert Browning, above all other 
writers of the century, put the love of man 
and woman in the true light, as the supreme 
worth of life; not as a half-sensuous excite- 
ment, with lapses and reactions, but as a 
great and holy mystery of devotion and 
service and mutual help. She too had her 
little taste of love. Mr. Nicholls, her 
father's curate, a man of deep tenderness 
behind his quiet homely ways, had proposed 
to her ; she had refused him ; but his suffering 
and bewilderment had touched her deeply, 
and at last she consented, though she went to 
her wedding in fear and dread; but she was 
rewarded, and for a few short months tasted 
a calm and sweet happiness, the joy of being 
needed and desired, and at the same time 
guarded and tended well. Her pathetic 
words, when she knew from his lips that she 
must die, "God will not part us — we have 
been so happy," are full of the deepest 
tragedy. 

I say again that I know of no instance 



Charlotte Bronte 161 

among the most intimate records of the 
human heart, in which life was faced with 
such splendid courage as it was by Charlotte 
Bronte. It contained so many things which 
she desired — art, beauty, thought, peace, 
deep and tender relations, and the supreme 
crown of love. But she never dreamed of 
trying to escape or shirk her lot. After 
her first great success with Jane Eyre, she 
might have lived life on her own lines; her 
writing meant wealth to one of her simple 
tastes; and as her closest friend said, if she 
had chosen to set up a house of her own, she 
would have been gratefully thanked for any 
kindness she might have shown to her house- 
hold, instead of being as she was ruthlessly 
employed and even tyrannised over. Con- 
sider how a young authoress, with that 
splendid success to her credit, would nowa- 
days be made much of and tended, begged 
to consult her own wishes and make her 
own arrangements. But Charlotte Bronte 
hated notoriety, and took her fame with a 
shrinking and modest amazement. She 

XX 



162 Where No Fear Was 

never gave herself airs, or displayed any 
affectation, or caught at any flattery. She 
just went back to her tragic home and carried 
the burden of housekeeping on her frail 
shoulders. The simplicity, the delicacy, the 
humility of it all is above praise. If ever 
there was a human being who might have 
pleaded to be excused from any gallant 
battling with life because of her bleak, 
comfortless, unhappy surroundings and her 
own sensitive temperament, it was Charlotte 
Bronte. But instead of that she fought 
silently with disaster and unhappiness, 
neither pitying herself for her destiny, nor 
taking the smallest credit for her tough 
resistance. It does not necessarily prove 
that all can wage so equal a fight with fears 
and sorrows; but it shows at least that an 
indomitable resolution can make a noble 
thing out of a life from which every cir- 
cumstance of romance and dignity seems to 
be purposely withdrawn. 

I do not think that there is in literature a 
more inspiring and heartening book than 



Charlotte Bronte 163 

Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. The 
book was written with a fine frankness and 
a daring indiscretion which cost Mrs. Gaskell 
very dear. It remains as one of the most 
matchless and splendid presentments of 
duty and passion and genius waging a per- 
fectly undaunted fight with life and tempera- 
ment, and carrying off the spoils not only of 
undying fame, but the far more supreme 
crown of moral force. Charlotte Bronte 
never doubted that she had been set in the 
forefront of the battle, and that her first con- 
cern was with the issues of life and sorrow 
and death. She died at thirty-eight, at a 
time when many men and women have 
hardly got a firm hold of life at all, or have 
parted with weak illusions. Yet years be- 
fore she had said sternly to a friend who 
was meditating a flight from hard condi- 
tions of life: "The right course is that which 
necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self- 
interest." Many people could have said 
that, but I know no figure who more relent- 
lessly and loyally carried out the principle 



1 64 Where No Fear Was 

than Charlotte Bronte, or who waged a more 
vigorous and tenacious battle with every 
onset of fear. "My conscience tells me," 
she once wrote about an anxious decision, 
"that it would be the act of a moral poltroon 
to let the fear of suffering stand in the way 
of improvement. But suffer I shall. No 
matter!" 



XIV 

JOHN STERLING 

I believe that the most affecting, beauti- 
ful, and grave message ever written from a 
death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to 
Carlyle. It reflects, perhaps, something of 
Carlyle's" own fine manner, but then Sterling 
had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant. 
Before I give it, let me add a brief account 
of Sterling. He was some ten years Carlyle's 
junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward 
Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a 
man who in his day wielded a mighty influ- 
ence. Carlyle describes the father's way of 
life, how he spent the day in going about 
London, rolling into clubs, volubly question- 
ing and talking; then returns home in the 
evening, and condenses it all into a leader, 
"and is found," said Carlyle, "to have hit 

165 



166 Where No Fear Was 

the essential purport of the world's immeasur- 
able babblement that day with an accuracy 
above all other men." 

The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was 
at Cambridge for a time, but never took his 
degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, 
tales, plays, endless poems — all of thin and 
vapid quality. His brief life, for he died at 
thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he 
travelled about in search of health, for he 
was early threatened with consumption; for 
a short time he was a curate in the English 
Church, but drifted away from that. He 
lived for a time at Falmouth, and afterwards 
at Ventnor. He must have been a man of 
extraordinary charm, and with quite un- 
equalled powers of conversation. Even 
Carlyle seems to have heard him gladly, and 
that is no ordinary compliment, considering 
Carlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, oc- 
casionally suppressed but generally trench- 
antly expressed, with which Carlyle listened 
to other well-known talkers like Coleridge 
and Macaulay. 



John Sterling 167 

Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection 
and admiration for Sterling; he rains down 
praises upon him, in that wonderful little 
biography, which is probably the finest piece 
of work that Carlyle ever did. 

He speaks of Sterling as " brilliant, beau- 
tiful, cheerful, with an ever-flowing wealth 
of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with 
frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audaci- 
ties, activities, and general radiant vivacity 
of heart and intelligence, which made the 
presence of him an illumination and inspira- 
tion wherever he went." 

But all Carlyle's love and admiration for 
his friend did not induce him to praise 
Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a 
poet, but without the gift of expression. He 
says that all Sterling's work was spoilt by 
over-haste, and " a lack of due inertia." The 
fact is that Sterling was a sort of improvisa- 
tore, and what was beautiful and natural 
enough when poured out in talk, and with 
the stimulus of congenial company, grew 
pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; 



1 68 Where No Fear Was 

he had, in fact, no instinct for art or for 
design, and he failed whenever he tried to 
mould ideas into form. 

The shadow of illness darkened about him 
and he spent long periods in prostrate seclu- 
sion, tended by his wife and children, unable 
to write or talk or receive his friends. Then a 
terrible calamity befell him. His mother, to 
whom he was devotedly attached, died after 
a long illness, Sterling not being allowed to 
go to her, or to leave his own sick-room. He 
received the news one morning by letter, that 
all was over, went in to tell his wife, who was 
ill; while they were talking, his wife became 
faint, and died two hours later. So that 
within a few hours he lost the two human 
beings whom he most devotedly loved, and 
on whom he most depended for sympathy 
and help. 

But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, 
he never seems to have lost his interest in life 
and thought, in ideas, questions, and pro- 
blems. Again and again he came back to the 
surface, with an irrepressible zest and fresh- 



John Sterling 169 

ness, and even gaiety, until at last all hope of 
life was extinguished. He lay dying for 
many weeks, and it was then that he wrote 
his last letter to Carlyle, which must be given 
in full : 

"Hillside, Ventnor, 
" 10th August, 1844. 

"My dear Carlyle, — For the first time for 
many months it seems possible to send you 
a few words; merely, however, for Remem- 
brance and Farewell. On higher matters 
there is nothing to say. I tread the common 
road into the great darkness, without any 
thought of fear, and with very much of 
hope. Certainty indeed I have none. 
With regard to you and me I cannot begin to 
write ; having nothing for it but to keep shut 
the lid of those secrets with all the iron 
weights that are in my power. Towards 
me it is still more true than towards England 
that no man has been and done like you. 
Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand 
when there, that will not be wanting. It 



170 Where No Fear Was 

is all very strange, but not one hundredth 
part so sad as it seems to the standers-by. 

" Your Wife knows my mind towards her, 
and will believe it without asseverations. — 
Yours to the last, 

"John Sterling." 

That letter may speak for itself. In its 
dignity, its nobleness, its fearlessness, it is 
one of the finest human documents I know. 
But let it be remembered that it is not the 
letter of a mournful and heart-broken man, 
turning his back on life in an ecstasy of 
despair; but the letter of one who had taken 
a boundless delight in life, had known upon 
equal terms most of the finest intellects of 
the day, and had been frankly recognised 
by them as a chosen spirit. All Sterling's 
designs for life and work had been slowly 
and surely thwarted by the pressure of hope- 
less illness; yet he had never complained or 
fretted or brooded, or indulged in any bitter 
recriminations against his destiny. That 
seems to me a very heroic attitude; while 



John Sterling 171 

the letter itself, in its perfect frankness 
and courage, without a touch of solemnity 
or affectation, or any trace of craven shrink- 
ing from his doom, makes it in its noble 
simplicity one of the finest "last words" 
that I have ever read, and finer, I verily be- 
lieve, than any flight of poetical imagination. 

A few days later he sent Carlyle some 
stanzas of verse, " written, " says Carlyle, 
"as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which 
are among my sacred possessions, to be kept 
for myself alone." 

A few weeks before he wrote his last letter 
to Carlyle, Sterling had written a letter to his 
son, who was then a boy at school in London. 
In that he says: "When I fancy how you are 
walking in the same streets, and moving 
along the same river, that I used to watch so 
intently, as if in a dream, when younger than 
you are — I could gladly burst into tears, not 
of grief, but with a feeling that there is no 
name for. Everything is so wonderful, great 
and holy, so sad and yet not bitter, so full of 
Death and so bordering on Heaven. Can 



172 Where No Fear Was 

you understand anything of this? If you 
can, you will begin to know what a serious 
matter our Life is ; how unworthy and stupid 
it is to trifle it away without heed; what a 
wretched, insignificant, worthless creature 
anyone comes to be, who does not as soon as 
possible bend his whole strength, as in string- 
ing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies 
first before him." 

That again is a noble letter; but over it I 
think there lies a little shadow of regret, a 
sense that he had himself wasted some of the 
force of life in vague trifling; but even that 
mood had passed away in the nearness of the 
great impending change, leaving him up- 
borne upon the greatness of God, in deep 
wonder and hope, knowing nothing more, 
in his weariness and his suffering, but the 
calmness of the Eternal Will. 



XV 

INSTINCTIVE FEAR 

The fears then from which men suffer, and 
even the greatest men not least, seem to 
be strangely complicated by the fact that 
Nature does not seem to work as fast in the 
physical world as in the mental world. The 
mosquitoes of South American swamps are 
all fitted with a perfect tool-box of imple- 
ments for piercing the hides of warm-blooded 
animals and drawing blood, although warm- 
blooded animals have long ceased to exist in 
those localities. But as the mosquito is one 
of the few creatures which can propagate its 
kind without ever partaking of food, the 
mosquito has therefore not died out, and 
though for many generations billions upon 
billions of mosquitoes have never had a 
chance of doing what they seem born to do, 

173 



174 Where No Fear Was 

they have not discarded their apparatus. 
If mosquitoes could reason and philosophise, 
the prospect of such a meal might remain as a 
far-off and inspiring ideal of life and conduct, 
a thing which heroes in the past had achieved, 
and which might be possible again if they 
remained true to their highest instincts. So 
it is with humanity. Many of our fears do 
not correspond to any real danger; they are 
part of a panoply which we inherit, and have 
to do with the instinct of self-preservation. 
We are exposed to dangers still, dangers of 
infection for instance, but we have developed 
no instinctive fear which helps us to recognise 
the presence of infection. We take rational 
precautions against it when we recognise it, 
but the vast prevalence and mortality of con- 
sumption a generation or two ago was due to 
the fact that we did not recognise consump- 
tion as infectious, and many fine lives — 
Keats, Emily Bronte, to name but two — 
were sacrificed to careless proximity as well 
as to devoted tendance ; but here Nature with 
all her instinct of self-preservation did not 



Instinctive Fear 175 

hang out any danger signal, or provide human 
beings with any instinctive fear to protect 
them. Our instinctive fears, such as our 
fear of darkness and solitude and our sus- 
picion of strangers, seem to date from a 
time when such conditions were really dan- 
gerous, though they are so no longer. 

At the same time the development of the 
imaginative faculty has brought with it a 
whole series of new terrors, through our 
power of anticipating and picturing possible 
calamities; while our increased sensitiveness, 
as well as our more sentimental morality, 
exposes us to yet another range of fears. 
Consider the dread which many of us feel at 
the prospect of a painful interview, our 
avoidance of an unpleasant scene, our terror 
of arousing anger. The basis of all this is the 
primeval dread of personal violence. We 
are afraid of arousing anger not because we 
expect to be assailed by blows and wounds, 
but because our far-off ancestors expected 
anger to end in an actual assault. We may 
know that we shall emerge from an unpleasant 



176 Where No Fear Was 

interview unscathed in fortune and in limb, 
but we anticipate it with a quite irrational 
terror, because we are still haunted by fears 
which date from a time when injury was the 
natural outcome of wrath. It may be our 
duty, and we may recognise it to be our duty, 
to make a protest of an unpleasant kind, or to 
withstand the action of an irritable person; 
but though we know well enough that he has 
no power to injure us, the flashing eye, the 
distended nostril, the rising pallor, the up- 
lifted voice have a disagreeable effect on our 
nerves although we know well that no physical 
disaster will result from it. Mrs. Browning, 
for instance, though she had high moral cour- 
age and tenacity of purpose, could not face 
an interview with her father, because an ex- 
hibition of his anger caused her to faint away 
on the spot. One does not often experience 
this whiff of violent anger in middle life ; but, 
the other day, I had occasion to speak to a 
colleague of mine on a Board of which I am a 
member, at the conclusion of a piece of busi- 
ness in which I had proposed and carried a 



Instinctive Fear 177 

certain policy. I did not know that he dis- 
approved of the policy in question, but I 
found on speaking to him that he was in a 
towering passion at my having opposed the 
policy which he preferred. He grew pale 
with rage; the hair on his head seemed to 
bristle, his eyes flashed fire ; he slammed down 
a bundle of papers in his hand on the table, he 
stamped with passion; and I confess that it 
was profoundly disturbing and disconcerting. 
I felt for a moment that sickening sense of 
misgiving with which as a little boy one con- 
fronted an angry schoolmaster. Though I 
knew that I had a perfect right to my opinion, 
though I recognised that my sensations were 
quite irrational, I felt myself confronted with 
something demoniacal and insane, and the 
basis of it was, I am sure, physical and not 
moral terror. If I had been bullied or 
chastised as a child, I should be able to refer 
the discomfort I felt to old associations. 
But I feel no doubt that my emotion was 
something far more primeval than that, 
and that the dumb and atrophied sense of 



178 Where No Fear Was 

self-preservation was at work. The fear 
then that I felt was an instinctive thing, 
and was experienced in the inner nature and 
not in the rational mind ; and the perplexity 
of the situation arises from the fact that 
such fear cannot be combated by rational 
considerations. Though no harm whatever 
resulted or could result from such an inter- 
view, yet I am certain that the prospect 
of such an outbreak would make me in the 
future far more cautious in dealing with this 
particular man, more anxious to conciliate 
him, and probably more disposed to com- 
promise a matter. 

Such an incident makes one unpleasantly 
aware of the quality of one's nature and 
temperament. It shows one that though one 
may have a strong moral and intellectual 
sense of what is the right and sensible course 
to take, one may be sadly hampered in carry- 
ing it out by this secret and hidden instinct of 
which one may be rationally ashamed, but 
which is characteristic of what seems to be the 
stronger and more vital part of one's self. 



Instinctive Fear 179 

The whole of civilisation is a combat 
between these two forces, a struggle between 
the rational and the instinctive parts of the 
mind. The instinctive mind bids one follow 
profit, need, advantage, the pleasure of the 
moment; the rational part of the mind bids 
one abstain, resist, balance contingencies, 
act in accordance with a moral standard. 
Many such abstentions become a mere 
matter of habit. If one is hungry and 
thirsty, and meets a child carrying bread 
or milk, one has no impulse to seize the food 
and eat it. One does not reflect upon the 
possible outcome of following the impulse 
of plunder; it simply does not enter one's 
head so to act. And there is of course a 
slow process going on in the world by which 
this moral restraint is becoming habitual and 
instinctive; but notably in the case of fear 
our instinct is a belated one, and results in 
many causeless and baseless anxieties which 
our reason in vain assures us are wholly false. 

What then is our practical way of escape 
from the dominion of these shadows? Not, 



180 Where No Fear Was 

I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat 
them by rational weapons ; the rational argu- 
ment, the common-sense consolation, only 
touches the rational part of the mind; we 
have got to get behind and below that, we 
have got somehow to fight instinct by 
instinct, and quell the terror in its proper 
home. By our finite nature, we are compelled 
to attend to one thing at a time, and thus if 
we use rational argument, we are recognising 
the presence of the irrational fear; it is of 
little use then to array our advantages against 
our disadvantages, our blessings against our 
sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with such 
small effect in The Wrong Box; our only 
chance is to turn tail altogether, and try to 
set some other dominant instinct at work; 
while we remember, we shall continue to 
suffer; our best chance lies in forgetting, and 
we can do that only by calling some other 
dominant emotion into play. 

And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing 
effect of these baser emotions. As Victor 
Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, 



Instinctive Fear 181 

"Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring 
with them a particular kind of physical 
fatigue which makes us listless and inert. 
They lie on the spirit with a leaden dulness 
which takes from us all possibility of energy 
and motion. Who does not know the 
instinct, when one is crushed and tortured 
by depression, to escape into solitude and 
silence, and to let the waves and streams flow 
over one. That is a universal instinct, and 
it is not wholly to be disregarded; it shows 
that to torture oneself into rational activity 
is of little use, or worse than useless. 

When I was myself a sufferer from long 
nervous depression, and had to face a social 
gathering, I used out of very shame, and 
partly I think out of a sense of courtesy due 
to others, to galvanise myself into a sort of 
horrid merriment. The dark tide flowed on 
beneath in its sore and aching channels. It 
was common enough then for some sym- 
pathetic friend to say: "You seemed better 
to-night — you were quite yourself; that is 
what you want; if you would only make the 



1 82 Where No Fear Was 

effort and go out more into society, you 
would soon forget your troubles." There 
is something in it, because the sick mind 
must be persuaded if possible not to grave its 
dolorous course too indelibly in the tempera- 
ment ; but no one else could see the acute and 
intolerable reaction which used to follow such 
a strain, or how, the excitement over, the 
suffering resumed its sway over the exhausted 
self with an insupportable agony. I am sure 
that in my long affliction I never suffered 
more than after occasions when I was be- 
trayed by excitement into argument or 
lively talk, and the worst spasms of melan- 
choly that I ever endured were the direct 
and immediate results of such efforts. 

The counteracting force in fact must be 
an emotional and instinctive one, not a ra- 
tional and deliberate one; and this must be 
our next endeavour, to see in what direction 
the counterpoise must lie. 

In depression, then, and when causeless 
fears assail us, we must try to put the mind in 
easier postures, to avoid excess and strain, to 



Instinctive Fear 183 

live more in company, to do something 
different. Human beings are happiest in mo- 
notony and settled ways of life; but these 
also develop their own poisons, like sameness 
of diet however wholesome it may be. It is, 
I believe, an established fact that most people 
cannot eat a pigeon a day for fourteen days 
in succession; a pigeon is not unwholesome, 
but the digestion cannot stand iteration. 
There is an old and homely story of a man 
who suffering from dyspepsia went to a great 
doctor,. The doctor asked him what he 
ate, and he said that he always lunched off 
bread and cheese. "Try a mutton chop," 
said the doctor. He did so with excellent 
results. A year later he was ill again and 
went to the same doctor, who put him 
through the same catechism. "What do 
you have for luncheon?" said the doctor. 
"A chop," said the patient, conscious of 
virtuous obedience. ' ' Try bread and cheese, ' ' 
said the doctor. "Why," said the pa- 
tient, "that was the very thing you told 
me to avoid." "Yes," said the doctor, 



1 84 Where No Fear Was 

"and I tell you to avoid a chop now. You 
are suffering not from diet, but from mo- 
notony of diet — and you want a change." 
The principle holds good of ordinary life; 
it is humiliating to confess it, but these de- 
pressions and despondencies which beset us 
are often best met by very ordinary physical 
remedies. It is not uncommon for people 
who suffer from them to examine their con- 
sciences, rake up forgotten transgressions, 
and feel themselves to be under the anger of 
God. I do not mean that such scrutiny of 
life is wholly undesirable; depression, though 
it exaggerates our sinfulness, has a wonderful 
way of laying its finger on what is amiss, but 
we must not wilfully continue in sadness ; and 
sadness is often a combination of an old 
instinct with the staleness which comes of 
civilised life, and a return to nature, as it is 
called, is often a cure, because civilisation 
has this disadvantage, that it often takes 
from us the necessity of doing many of the 
things which it is normal to man by inherit- 
ance to do — fighting, hunting, preparing 



Instinctive Fear 185 

food, working with the hands. We combat 
these old instincts artificially by games and 
exercises. It is humiliating again to think 
that golf is an artificial substitute for man's 
need to hunt and plough, but it is undoubted- 
ly true ; and thus to break with the monotony 
of civilisation and to delude the mind into 
believing that it is occupied with primal needs 
is often a great refreshment. Anyone who 
fishes and shoots knows that the joy of 
securing a fish or a partridge is entirely out of 
proportion to any advantages resulting. A 
lawyer could make money enough in a single 
week to buy the whole contents of a fish- 
monger's shop, but this does not give him 
half the satisfaction which comes from fishing 
day after day for a whole week, and securing 
perhaps three salmon. The fact is that the 
old savage mind, which lies behind the 
rational and educated mind is having its 
fling; it believes itself to be staving off 
starvation by its ingenuity and skill, and 
it unbends like a loosened bow. 

We may be enjoying our work, and we may 



1 86 Where No Fear Was 

even take glad refuge in it to stave off de- 
pression, but we are then often adding fuel 
to the fire, and tiring the very faculty of re- 
sistance, which hardly knows that it needs 
resting. 

The smallest change of scene, of company, 
of work may effect a miraculous improvement 
when we are feeling low-spirited and listless. 
It is not idleness as a rule that we want, but 
the use of other faculties and powers and 
muscles. 

And thus though our anxieties may be a 
real factor in our success and may give us 
the touch of prudence and vigilance we want, 
it does not do to allow ourselves to drift into 
vague fears and dull depressions, and we must 
fight them in a practical way. We must re- 
member the case of Naaman, who was vexed 
at being told to go and dip himself in a mud- 
stained stream running violently in rocky 
places, when he might have washed in Abana 
and Pharpar, the statelier, purer, fuller 
streams of his native land. It is just the 
little homely torrent that we need, and part 



Instinctive Fear 187 

of our cares come from being too dignified 
about them. It is pleasanter to think one- 
self the battle-ground for high and tragical 
forces of a spiritual kind, than to realise 
that some little homely bit of common 
machinery is out of gear. But we must 
resist the temptation to feel that our fears 
have a dark and great significance. We 
must simply treat them as little sicknesses 
and ailments of the soul. 

I therefore believe that fears are like those 
little fugitive gliding things that seem to dart 
across the field of the eye when it is weak and 
ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery 
webs that float and fly, and can never be 
fixed and truly seen; and that they are best 
treated as we learn to treat common ailments, 
by not concerning ourselves very much about 
them, by enduring and evading them and 
distracting the mind, and not by facing them, 
because they will not be faced; nor can they 
be dispelled by reason, because they are not 
in the plane of reason at all, but phantoms 
gathered by the sick imagination, distorted 



1 88 Where No Fear Was 

out of their proper shape, evil nightmares, the 
horror of which is gone with the dawn. They 
are the shadows of our childishness, and they 
show that we have a long journey before us; 
and they gain their strength from the fact 
that we gather them together out of the 
future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, 
when we shall have the strength to snap them 
singly as they come. 

The real way to fight them is to get to- 
gether a treasure of interests and hopes and 
beautiful visions and emotions, and above 
all to have some definite work which lies 
apart from our daily work, to which we can 
turn gladly in empty hours; because fears 
are born of inaction and idleness, and melt 
insensibly away in the warmth of labour and 
duty. 

Nothing can really hurt us except our own 
despair. But the problem which is difficult 
is how to practise a real fulness of life and 
yet to keep a certain detachment, how to 
realise that what we do is small and petty 
enough but that the greatness lies in our 



Instinctive Fear 189 

energy and briskness of action; we should 
try to be interested in life as we are interested 
in a game, not believing too much in the 
importance of it, but yet intensely concerned 
at the moment in playing it as well and skil- 
fully as possible. The happiest people of 
all are those who can shift their interest 
rapidly from point to point, and throw them- 
selves into the act of the moment whatever 
it may be. Of course, this is largely at first 
a matter of temperament, but temperament 
is not unalterable, and self- discipline working 
along the lines of habit has a great attractive- 
ness, the moment we feel that life is beginning 
to shape itself upon real lines. 



XVI 

FEAR OF LIFE 

Let us divide our fears up into definite 
divisions, and see how it is best to deal with 
them. Lowest and worst of all is the shape- 
less and bodiless fear, which is a real disease 
of brain and nerves. I know no more poign- 
ant description of this than in the strange 
book Lavengro: 

'"What ails you, my child/ said a mother 
to her son, as he lay on a couch under the 
influence of the dreadful one; 'what ails you? 
you seem afraid ! ' 

"Boy. And so I am; a dreadful fear is 
upon me. 

"Mother. But of what? there is no one 
can harm you; of what are you apprehen- 
sive? 

"Boy. Of nothing that I can express; I 

190 



Fear of Life 191 

know not what I am afraid of, but afraid 
I am. 

"Mother. Perhaps you see sights and 
visions; I knew a lady once who was con- 
tinually thinking that she saw an armed man 
threaten her, but it was only an imagination, 
a phantom of the brain. 

"Boy. No armed man threatens me; and 
'tis not a thing that would cause me any fear. 
Did an armed man threaten me, I would get 
up and fight him ; weak as I am, I would wish 
for nothing better, for then, perhaps, I should 
lose this fear ; mine is a dread of I know not 
what, and there the horror lies. 

"Mother. Your forehead is cool, and your 
speech collected. Do you know where you 
are? 

"Boy. I know where I am, and I see 
tilings just as they are; you are beside me, 
and upon the table there is a book which 
was written by a Florentine. All this I see, 
and that there is no ground for being afraid. 
I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain 
— but — but 



192 Where No Fear Was 

"And then there was a burst of 'gemiti, 
sospiri ed alti guai.' Alas, alas, poor child 
of clay ! as the sparks fly upward, so wast thou 
born to sorrow — Onward ! " 

That is a description of amazing power, but 
of course we are here dealing with a definite 
brain-malady, in which the emotional centres 
are directly affected. This in a lesser degree, 
no doubt, affects more people than one would 
wish to think; but it may be considered a 
physical malady of which fear is the symptom 
and not the cause. 

Let us then frankly recognise the physical 
element in these irrational terrors; and when 
one has once done this, a great burden is 
taken off the mind, because one sees that 
such fear may be a real illusion, a sort of 
ghastly mockery, which by directly affecting 
the delicate machinery through which emo- 
tion is translated into act, may produce a 
symptom of terror which is both causeless 
and baseless, and which may imply neither 
a lack of courage nor self-control. 

And, therefore, I feel, as against the Ascetic 



Fear of Life 193 

and the Stoic, that I am meant to live and 
to taste the fulness of life ; and that if I begin 
by choosing the wrong joys, it is that I may 
learn their unreality. I have learned already 
to compromise about many things, to be 
content with getting much less than I desire, 
to acquiesce in missing many good things 
altogether. But asceticism for the sake of 
prudence seems to me a wilful error, as though 
a man practised starvation through uneasy 
days because of the chance that he might 
some day find himself with not enough to 
eat. The only self-denial worth practising 
is the self-denial that one admires, and that 
seems to one to be fine and beautiful. 

For we must emphatically remember that 
the saint is one who lives life with high en- 
joyment, and with a vital zest; he chooses 
holiness because of its irresistible beauty and 
because of the appeal it makes to his mind. 
He does not creep through life ashamed, de- 
pressed, anxious, letting ordinary delights 
slip through his nerveless fingers; and if he 
denies himself common pleasures, it is be- 
13 



194 Where No Fear Was 

cause, if indulged, they thwart and mar his 
purer and more lively joys. 

The fear of life, the frame of mind which 
says, "This attractive and charming thing 
captivates me, but I will mistrust it and keep 
it at arm's length, because if I lose it, I shall 
experience discomfort," seems to me a poor 
and timid handling of life. I would rather 
say, "I will use it generously and freely, 
knowing that it may not endure; but it is a 
sign to me of God's care for me, that He 
gives me the desire and the gratification ; and 
even if He means me to learn that it is only 
a small thing, I can learn it only by using it 
and trying its sweetness." 

This may be held a dangerous doctrine; 
but I do not mean that life must be a foolish 
and ingenuous indulgence of every appetite 
and whim. One must make choices; and 
there are many appetites which come hand 
in hand with their own shadow. I am not 
here speaking of tampering with sin; I think 
that most people burn their ringers over that 
in early life. But I am speaking rather of 



Fear of Life 195 

the delights of the body that are in no way 
sinful, food and drink, games and exercise, 
love itself; and of the joys of the mind and 
the artistic sense ; free and open relations with 
men and women of keen interests and eager 
fancies; the delights of work, professional 
success, the doing of pleasant tasks as vigor- 
ously and as perfectly as one can — all the 
stir and motion and delight of life. 

To shrink back in terror from all this seems 
to me a sort of cowardice ; and it is a coward- 
ice too to go on indulging in things which 
one does not enjoy for the sake of social 
tradition. One must not be afraid of break- 
ing with social custom, if one finds that it 
leads one into dreary and useless formalities, 
stupid and expensive entertainments, tire- 
some gatherings, dull and futile assemblies. 
I think that men and women ought gaily 
and delightedly to choose the things that 
minister to their vigour and joy, and to throw 
themselves willingly into these things, so 
long as they do not interfere with plainer 
and simpler duties. 



196 Where No Fear Was 

Another way of escape from the impor- 
tunities of fear is to be very resolute in fight- 
ing against our personal claims to honour and 
esteem. We are sorely wounded through our 
ambitions, whether they be petty or great, 
and it is astonishing to find how frail a basis 
often serves for a sense of dignity. I have 
known lowly and unimportant people who 
were yet full of pragmatical self -concern, 
and whose pride took the form not so much of 
exalting their own consequence as of thinking 
meanly of other people. It is easy to restore 
one's own confidence by dwelling with bitter 
emphasis on the faults and failings of those 
about one, by cataloguing the deficiencies 
of those who have achieved success, by 
accustoming oneself to think of one's own 
lack of success as a sign of unworldliness, 
and by attributing the success of others to a 
cynical and unscrupulous pursuit of reputa- 
tion. There is nothing in the world which 
so differentiates men and women as the 
tendency to suspect and perceive affronts, 
and to nurture grievances. It is so fatally 



Fear of Life 197 

easy to think that one has been inconsider- 
ately treated, and to mistake susceptibility 
for courage. Let us boldly face the fact that 
we get in this world very much what we 
earn and deserve, and there is no surer way 
of being excluded and left out from whatever 
is going forward than a habit of claiming 
more respect and deference than is due to 
one. If we are snubbed and humiliated, 
it is generally because we have put ourselves 
forward and taken more than our share. 
Whereas if we have been content to bear 
a hand, to take trouble, and to desire useful 
work rather than credit, our influence grows 
silently and we become indispensable. A 
man who does not notice petty grumbling, 
who laughs away sharp comments, who does 
not brood over imagined insults, who forgets 
irritable passages, who makes allowance for 
impatience and fatigue, is singularly invulner- 
able. The power of forgetting is infinitely 
more valuable than the power of forgiving in 
many conjunctions of life. In nine cases out 
of ten, the wounds which our sensibilities 



198 Where No Fear Was 

receive are the merest pin-pricks, enlarged 
and fretted by our own hands; we work the 
little thorn about in the puncture till it 
festers, instead of drawing it out and casting 
it away. 

Very few of the prizes of life that we covet 
are worth winning, if we scheme to get them; 
it is the honour or the task that comes to us 
unexpectedly that we deserve. I have heard 
discontented men say that they never get the 
particular work that they desire and for 
which they feel themselves to be suited; and 
meanwhile life flies swiftly, while we are 
picturing ourselves in all sorts of coveted 
situations, and slighting the peaceful hap- 
piness, the beautiful joys which lie all 
around us, as we go forward in our greedy 
reverie. 

I have been much surprised, since I began 
some years ago to receive letters from all 
sorts of unknown people, to realise how many 
persons there are in the world who think 
themselves unappreciated. Such are not 
generally people who have tried and failed, — 



Fear of Life 199 

an honest failure very often brings a whole- 
some sense of incompetence, — but they are 
generally persons who think that they have 
never had a chance of showing what is in 
them, speakers who have found their audi- 
ences unresponsive, writers who have been 
discouraged by finding their amateur efforts 
unsalable, men who lament the unsuitability 
of their profession to their abilities, women 
who find themselves living in what they call 
a thoroughly unsympathetic circle. The 
failure here lies in an incapacity to believe 
in one's own inefficiency, and a sturdy 
persuasion of the malevolence of others. 

Here is a soil in which fears spring up like 
thorns and briars. "Whatever I do or say, 
I shall be passed over and slighted, I shall 
always find people determined to exclude 
and neglect me!" I know myself, only too 
well, how fertile the brain is in discovering 
almost any reason for a failure except what 
is generally the real reason, that the work 
was badly done. And the more eager one 
is for personal recognition and patent success, 



200 Where No Fear Was 

the more sickened one is by any hint of 
contempt and derision. 

But it is quite possible, as I also know 
from personal experience, to go patiently 
and humbly to work again, to face the 
reasons for failure, to learn to enjoy work, to 
banish from the mind the uneasy hope of 
personal distinction. We may try to discern 
the humour of Providence, because I am as 
certain as I can be of anything that we are 
humorously treated as well as lovingly 
regarded. Let me relate two small incidents 
which did me a great deal of good at a time 
of self-importance. I was once asked to 
give a lecture, and it was widely announced. 
I saw my own name in capital letters upon 
advertisements displayed in the street. On 
the evening appointed, I went to the place, 
and met the chairman of the meeting and 
some of the officials in a room adjoining the 
hall where I was to speak. We bowed and 
smiled, paid mutual compliments, congra- 
tulated each other on the importance of 
the occasion. At last the chairman con- 



Fear of Life 201 

suited his watch and said it was time to be 
beginning. A procession was formed, a 
door was majestically thrown open by an 
attendant, and we walked with infinite 
solemnity on to the platform of an entirely 
empty hall, with rows of benches all wholly 
unfurnished with guests. I think it was one 
of the most ludicrous incidents I ever re- 
member. The courteous confusion of the 
chairman, the dismay of the committee, the 
colossal nature of the fiasco filled me, I am 
glad to say, not with mortification, but with 
an overpowering desire to laugh. 

I may add that there had been a mistake 
about the announcement of the hour, and ten 
minutes later a minute audience did arrive, 
whom I proceeded to address with such spirit 
as I could muster; but I have always been 
grateful for the humorous nature of the snub 
administered to me. 

Again on another occasion I had to pay a 
visit of business to a remote house in the 
country. A good-natured friend descanted 
upon the excitement it would be to the house- 



202 Where No Fear Was 

hold to entertain a living author, and how 
eagerly my utterances would be listened to. 
I was received not only without respect, but 
with obvious boredom. In the course of the 
afternoon, I discovered that I was supposed 
to be a solicitor's clerk, but when a little later 
it transpired what my real occupations were, 
I was not displeased to find that no member 
of the party had ever heard of my existence, 
or was aware that I had ever published a 
book, and when I was questioned as to what 
I had written, no one had ever come across 
anything that I had printed, until at last I 
soared into some transient distinction by the 
discovery that my brother was the author of 
Dodo. 

I cannot help feeling that there is some- 
thing gentl> humorous about this good- 
humoured indication that the whole civilised 
world is not engaged in the pursuit of litera- 
ture, and that one's claims to considera- 
tion depend upon one's social merits. I do 
honestly think that Providence was here 
deliberately poking fun at me, and showing 



Fear of Life 203 

me that a habit of presenting one's opinions 
broadcast to the world does not necessarily 
mean that the world is much aware either 
of oneself or of one's opinions. 

The cure then, it seems to me, for personal 
ambition, is the humorous reflection that the 
stir and hum of one's own particular teetotum 
is confined to a very small space and range; 
and that the humorous description of the 
Greek politician who was said to be well 
known throughout the whole civilised world 
and at Lampsacus, or of the philosopher who 
was announced as the author of many epoch- 
making volumes and as the second cousin of 
the Earl of Cork, represents a very real truth, 
that reputation is not a thing which is worth 
bothering one's head about ; that if it comes, 
it is apt to be quite as inconvenient as it is 
pleasant, while if one grows to depend upon 
it, it is as liable to part with its sparkle as 
soda-water in an open glass. 

And then if one comes to consider the com- 
moner claim, the claim to be felt and re- 
spected and regarded in one's own little 



204 Where No Fear Was 

circle, it is wholesome and humiliating to 
observe how generously and easily that 
regard is conceded to affectionateness and 
kindness, and how little it is won by any 
brilliance or sharpness. Of course, irritable, 
quick-tempered, severe, discontented people 
can win attention easily enough, and acquire 
the kind of consideration which is generally 
conceded to anyone who can be unpleasant. 
How often families and groups are drilled 
and cautioned by anxious mothers and sisters 
not to say or do anything which will vex 
so-and-so! Such irritable people get the 
rooms and the chairs and the food that they 
like, and the talk in their presence is eagerly 
kept upon subjects on which they can hold 
forth. But how little such regard lasts, 
and how welcome a relief it is, when one that 
is thus courted and deferred to is absent ! Of 
course, if one is wholly indifferent whether one 
is regarded, needed, missed, loved, so long as 
one can obtain the obedience and the con- 
veniences one likes, there is no more to be 
said. But I often think of that wonderful 



Fears of Life 205 

poem of Christina Rossetti's about the 
revenant, the spirit that returns to the fa- 
miliar house, and finds himself unregretted: 

* ' To-morrow ' ' and ' ' to-day, ' ' they cried ; 
I was of yesterday! 

One sometimes sees, in the faces of old 
family servants, in unregarded elderly rela- 
tives, bachelor uncles, maiden aunts, who are 
entertained as a duty, or given a home in 
charity, a very beautiful and tender look, 
indescribable in words but unmistakable, 
when it seems as if self, and personal claims, 
and pride, and complacency had really passed 
out of the expression, leaving nothing but 
a hope of being loved, and a desire to do 
some humble s^~vice. 

I saw it the other day in the face of a little 
old lady, who lived in the house of a well-to- 
do cousin, with rather a bustling and vigorous 
family pervading the place. She was a 
small frail creature, with a tired worn face, 
but with no look of fretfulness or discontent. 
She had a little attic as a bedroom, and she 



206 Where No Fear Was 

was not considered in any way. She effaced 
herself, ate about as much as a bird would 
eat, seldom spoke, uttering little ejaculations 
of surprise and amusement at what was said; 
if there was a place vacant in the carriage, 
she drove out. If there was not, she stopped 
at home. She amused herself by going 
about in the village, talking to the old women 
and the children, who half loved and half 
despised her for being so very unimportant, 
and for having nothing she could give away. 
But I do not think the little lady ever had a 
thought except of gratitude for her bless- 
ings, and admiration for the robustness and 
efficiency of her relations. She claimed 
nothing from life and expected nothing. It 
seemed a little frail and vanquished existence, 
and there was not an atom of what is called 
proper pride about her; but it was fine, for 
all that. An infinite sweetness looked out 
of her eyes; she suffered a good deal, but never 
complained. She was glad to live, found the 
world a beautiful and interesting place, and 
never quarrelled with her slender share of 



Fears of Life 207 

its more potent pleasures. And she will 
slip silently out of life some day in her attic 
room; and be strangely mourned and missed. 
I do not consider that a failure in life, and I 
am not sure that it is not something much 
more like a triumph. I know that as I 
watched her one evening knitting in the 
corner, following what was said with intense 
enjoyment, uttering her little bird-like cries, 
I thought how few of the things that could 
afflict me had power to wound her, and how 
little she had to fear. I do not think she 
wanted to take flight, but yet I am sure she 
had no dread of death; and when she goes 
thitherward, leaving the little tired and 
withered frame behind, it will be just as 
when the crested lark springs up from the 
dust of the roadway, and wings his way 
into the heart of the dewy upland. 



XVII 

SIMPLICITY 

If we are to avoid the dark onset of fear, we 
must at all costs simplify life, because the 
more complicated and intricate our life is, 
and the more we multiply our defences, the 
more gates and posterns there are by which 
the enemy can creep upon us. Property, 
comforts, habits, conveniences, these are 
the vantage-grounds from which fears can 
organise their invasions. The more that 
we need excitement, distraction, diversion, 
the more helpless we become without 
them. All this is very clearly recognised 
and stated in the Gospel. Our Saviour does 
not seem to regard the abandonment of 
wealth as a necessary condition of the Christ- 
ian life, but He does very distinctly say that 
rich men are beset with great difficulties 

208 



Simplicity 209 

owing to their wealth, and He indicates that 
a man who trusts complacently in his posses- 
sions is tempted into a disastrous security. 
He speaks of laying up treasure in heaven as 
opposed to the treasures which men store up 
on earth; and He points out that whenever 
things are put aside unused, in order that the 
owner may comfort himself by the thought 
that they are there if he wants them, decay 
and corruption begin at once to undermine 
and destroy them. What exactly the trea- 
sure in heaven can be it is hard to define. 
It cannot be anything quite so sordid as 
good deeds done for the sake of spiritual 
investment, because our Saviour was very 
severe on those who, like the Pharisees, 
sought to acquire righteousness by scrupu- 
losity. Nothing that is done just for the 
sake of one's own future benefit seems to be 
regarded in the Gospel as worth doing. The 
essence of Christian giving seems to be real 
giving, and not a sort of usurious loan. There 
is of course one very puzzling parable, that of 
the unjust steward, who used his last hours 
14 



210 Where No Fear Was 

in office, before the news of his dismissal 
could get abroad, in cheating his master, 
in order to win the favour of the debtors by 
arbitrarily diminishing the amount of their 
debts. It seems strange that our Saviour 
should have drawn a moral out of so immoral 
an incident. Perhaps he was using a well- 
known story, and even making allowances 
for the admiration with which in the East 
resourcefulness, even of a fraudulent kind, 
was undoubtedly regarded. But the principle 
seems clear enough, that if the Christian 
chooses to possess wealth, he runs a great 
risk, and that it is therefore wiser to dis- 
embarrass oneself of it. Property is regarded 
in the Gospel as an undoubtedly dangerous 
thing; but so far from our Lord preaching a 
kind of socialism, and bidding men to co- 
operate anxiously for the sake of equalising 
wealth, He recommends an individualistic 
freedom from the burden of wealth alto- 
gether. But, as always in the Gospel, our 
Lord looks behind practice to motive; and it 
is clear that the motive for the abandonment 



Simplicity 211 

of wealth is not to be a desire to act with a 
selfish prudence, in order to lay an obligation 
upon God to repay one generously in the 
future for present sacrifices, but rather the 
attainment of an individual liberty, which 
leaves the spirit free to deal with the real 
interests of life. And one must not over- 
look the definite promise that if a man seeks 
virtue first, even at the cost of earthly pos- 
sessions and comforts, he will find that they 
will be added as well. 

Those who would discredit the morality of 
the Gospel would have one believe that our 
Saviour in dealing with shrewd, homely, 
literal folk was careful to promise substantial 
future rewards for any worldly sacrifices they 
might make ; but not so can I read the Gospel. 
Our Saviour does undoubtedly say plainly 
that we shall find it worth our while to 
escape from the burdens and anxieties of 
wealth, but the reward promised seems rather 
to be a lightness and contentment of spirit, 
and a freedom from heavy and unnecessary 
bonds. 



212 Where No Fear Was 

In our complicated civilisation, it is far 
more difficult to say what simplicity of life 
is. It is certainly not that expensive and 
dramatic simplicity which is sometimes con- 
trived by people of wealth as a pleasant con- 
trast to elaborate living. I remember the 
son of a very wealthy man, who had a great 
mansion in the country and a large house in 
London, telling me that his family circle were 
never so entirely happy as when they were 
living at close quarters in a small Scotch 
shooting-lodge, where their life was com- 
paratively rough, and luxuries unattainable. 
But I gathered that the main delight of such 
a period was the sense of laying up a stock of 
health and freshness for the more luxurious 
life which intervened. The Anglo-Saxon 
naturally loves a kind of feudal dignity; 
he likes a great house, a crowd of servants 
and dependents, the impression of power and 
influence which it all gives; and the delights 
of ostentation, of having handsome things 
which one does not use and indeed hardly 
ever sees, of knowing that others are eating 



Simplicity 213 

and drinking at one's expense, which is a 
thing far removed from hospitality, are dear 
to the temperament of our race. We may say 
at once that this is fatal to any simplicity of 
life ; it may be that we cannot expect anyone 
who is born to such splendours deliberately to 
forego them ; but I am sure of this, that a 
rich man, now and here, who spontaneously 
parted with his wealth and lived sparely in a 
small house, would make perhaps as powerful 
an appeal to the imagination of the English 
world as could well be made. If a man had a 
message to deliver, there could be no better 
way of emphasising it. It must not be a mere 
flight from the anxiety of worldly life into 
a more congenial seclusion. It should be 
done as Francis of Assisi did it, by continuing 
to live the life of the world without any of 
its normal conveniences. Patent and visible 
self-sacrifice, if it be accompanied by a tender 
love of humanity, will always be the most 
impressive attitude in the world. 

But if one is not capable of going to such 
lengths, if indeed one has nothing that one 



214 Where No Fear Was 

can resign, how is it possible to practise sim- 
plicity of life? It can be done by limiting 
one's needs, by avoiding luxuries, by hav- 
ing nothing in one's house that one cannot 
use, by being detached from pretentiousness, 
by being indifferent to elaborate comforts. 
There are people whom I know who do this, 
and who, even though they live with some de- 
gree of wealth, are yet themselves obviously 
independent of comfort to an extraordi- 
nary degree. There is a Puritanical dislike 
of waste which is a very different thing, 
because it often coexists with an extreme 
attachment to the particular standard of 
comfort that the man himself prefers. I 
know people who believe that a substantial 
midday meal and a high tea are more right- 
eous than a simple midday meal and a 
substantial dinner. But the right attitude 
is one of unconcern and the absence of uneasy 
scheming as to the details of life. There is 
no reason why people should not form habits, 
because method is the primary condition of 
work; but the moment that habit becomes 



Simplicity 215 

tyrannous and elaborate, then the spirit is at 
once in bondage to anxiety. The real victory 
over these little cares is not for ever to 
have them on one's mind; or one becomes 
like the bread-and-butter fly in Through the 
Looking-Glass, whose food was weak tea 
with cream in it. "But supposing it cannot 
find any?" said Alice. "Then it dies," 
says the gnat, who is acting the part of inter- 
preter. ' ' But that must happen very often ! " 
said Alice. "It always happens!" says the 
gnat with sombre emphasis. 

Simplicity is, in fact, a difficult thing to lay 
down rules for, because the essence of it is 
that it is free from rules ; and those who talk 
and think most about it, are often the most 
uneasy and complicated natures. But it is 
certain that if one finds oneself growing more 
and more fastidious and particular, more and 
more easily disconcerted and put out and 
hampered by any variation from the exact 
scheme of life that one prefers, even if that 
scheme is an apparently simple one, it is cer- 
tain that simplicity is at an end. The real 



2i 6 Where No Fear Was 

simplicity is a sense of being at home and at 
ease in any company and mode of living, and 
a quiet equanimity of spirit which cannot be 
content to waste time over the arrangements 
of life. Sufficient food and exercise and sleep 
may be postulated ; but these are all to be in 
the background, and the real occupations of 
life are to be work and interest and talk and 
ideas and natural relations with others. One 
knows of houses where some trifling omission 
of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will 
plunge the hostess into a dumb and incom- 
municable despair. The slightest lapse of the 
conventional order becomes a cloud that inter- 
cepts the sun. But the right attitude to life, 
if we desire to set ourselves free from this self- 
created torment, is a resolute avoidance 
of minute preoccupations, a light-hearted 
journeying, with an amused tolerance for the 
incidents of the way. A conventional order 
of life is useful only in so far as it removes from 
the mind the necessity of detailed planning, 
and allows it to flow punctually and mechani- 
cally in an ordered course. But if we exalt 



Simplicity 217 

that order into something sacred and solemn, 
then we become pharisaical and meticulous, 
and the savour of life is lost. 

One remembers the scene in David Copper- 
field which makes so fine a parable of life; 
how the merry party who were making the 
best of an ill-cooked meal, and grilling the 
chops over the lodging-house fire, were utterly 
disconcerted and reduced to miserable dig- 
nity by the entry of the ceremonious servant 
with his "Pray, permit me," and how his 
decorous management of the cheerful affair 
cast a gloom upon the circle, which could not 
even be. dispelled when he had finished his 
work and left them to themselves. 



XVIII 

AFFECTION 

One of the ways in which our fears have 
power to wound us most grievously is through 
our affections, and here we are confronted 
with a real and crucial difficulty. Are we to 
hold ourselves in, to check the impulses of 
affection, to use self-restraint, not multiply 
intimacies, not extend sympathies? One sees 
every now and then lives which have en- 
twined themselves with every tendril of 
passion and love and companionship and 
service round some one personality, and have 
then been bereaved, with the result that the 
whole life has been palsied and struck into 
desolation by the loss. I am thinking now of 
two instances which I have known; one was 
a wife, who was childless, and whose whole 

nature, every motive and every faculty, 

218 



Affection 219 

became centred upon her husband, a man 
most worthy of love. He died suddenly, 
and his wife lost everything at one blow; not 
only her lover and comrade, but every 
occupation as well which might have helped 
to distract her, because her whole life had 
been entirely devoted to her husband; and 
even the hours when he was absent from her 
had been given to doing anything and every- 
thing that might save him trouble or vexa- 
tion. She lived on, though she would 
willingly have died at any moment, and the 
whole fabric of her life was shattered. Again, 
I think of a devoted daughter who had done 
the same office for an old and not very robust 
father. I heard her once say that the sorrow 
of her mother's death had been almost 
nullified for her by finding that she could do 
everything for, and be everything to, her 
father, whom she almost adored. She had 
refused an offer of marriage from a man 
whom she sincerely loved, that she might 
not leave her father, and she never even told 
her father of the incident, for fear that he 



220 Where No Fear Was 

might have felt that he had stood in the way 
of her happiness. When he died, she too 
found herself utterly desolate, without ties 
and without occupation, an elderly woman 
almost without friends or companions. 

Ought one to feel that this kind of jealous 
absorption in a single individual affection is 
a mistake? It certainly brought both the 
wife and daughter an intense happiness, but, 
in both cases, the relation was so close and so 
intimate that it tended gradually to seclude 
them from all other relations. The husband 
and the father were both reserved and shy 
men, and desired no other companionship. 
One can see so easily how it all came about, 
and what the inevitable result was bound to 
be, and yet it would have been difficult at 
any point to say what could have been done. 
Of course, these great absorbed emotions 
involve large risks; but it may be doubted 
whether life can be safely lived on these 
intensive lines. These are of course extreme 
instances, but there are many cases in the 
world, and especially in the case of women 



Affection 221 

whose life is entirely built up on certain 
emotions like the love and care of children; 
and when that is so, a nature becomes liable 
to the sharpest incursions of fear. It is of 
little use arguing such cases theoretically, 
because, as the proverb says, as the land lies 
the water flows, — and love makes very light 
of all prudential considerations. 

The difficulty does not arise with large and 
generous natures which give love prodigally 
in many directions, because if one such rela- 
tion is broken by death, love can still exercise 
itself upon those that remain. It is the 
fierce and jealous sort of love that is so hard to 
deal with, a love that exults in solitariness 
of devotion, and cannot bear any intrusion 
of other relations. 

Yet if one believes, as I for one believe, 
that the secret of the world is somehow 
hidden in love, and can be interpreted 
through love alone, then one must run the 
risks of love, and seek for strength to bear the 
inevitable suffering which love must bring. 

But men and women are very differently 



222 Where No Fear Was 

made in this respect. Among innumerable 
minor differences, certain broad divisions are 
clear. Men, in the first place, both by train- 
ing and temperament, are far less dependent 
upon affection than women. Career and 
occupation play a much larger part in their 
thoughts. If one could test and intercept 
the secret and unoccupied reveries of men, 
when the mind moves idly among the objects 
which most concern it, it would be found, I 
do not doubt, that men's minds occupy them- 
selves much more about definite and tangible 
things — their work, their duties, their ambi- 
tions, their amusements — and centre little 
upon the thought of other people ; an affection, 
an emotional relation, is much more of an inci- 
dent than a settled preoccupation; and then 
with men there are two marked types, those 
who give and lavish affection freely, who are 
interested and attracted by others and wish 
to attach and secure close friends ; and there are 
others who respond to advances, yet do not go 
in search of friendship, but only accept it when 
it comes ; and the singular thing is that such na- 



Affection 223 

tures, which are often cold and self-absorbed, 
have a power of kindling emotion in others 
which men of generous and eager feeling 
sometimes lack. It is strange that it should 
be so, but there is some psychological law 
at the back of it; and it is certainly true in 
my experience that the men who have been 
most eagerly sought in friendship have not 
as a rule been the most open-hearted and 
expansive natures. I suppose that a certain 
law of pursuit holds good, and that people 
of self-contained temperament, with a sort of 
baffling charm, who are critical and hard to 
please, excite a certain ambition in those who 
would claim their affection. 

Women, I have no doubt, live far more 
in the thought of others and desire their 
regard; they wish to arrive at mutual 
understanding and confidence, to explore 
personality, to pierce behind the surface, to 
establish a definite relation. Yet in the 
matter of relations with others, women are 
often, I believe, less sentimental, and even 
less tender-hearted than men, and they have 



224 Where No Fear Was 

a far swifter and truer intuition of character. 
Though the two sexes can never really under- 
stand each other's point of view, because no 
imagination can cross the gulf of fundamental 
difference, yet I am certain that women 
understand men far better than men 
understand women. The whole range of 
motives is strangely different, and men can 
never grasp the comparative unimportance 
with which women regard the question of 
occupation. Occupation is for men a definite 
and isolated part of life, a thing important 
and absorbing in itself, quite apart from any 
motives or reasons. To do something, to 
make something, to produce something — 
that desire is always there, whatever ebb and 
flow of emotions there may be ; it is an end in 
itself with men, and with many women it is 
not so; for women mostly regard work as a 
necessity, but not an interesting necessity. 
In a woman's occupation, there is generally 
someone at the end of it, for whom and in 
connection with whom it is done. This is 
probably largely the result of training and 



Affection 225 

tradition, and great changes are now going 
on in the direction of women finding occu- 
pations for themselves. But take the case of 
such a profession as teaching; it is quite 
possible for a man to be an effective and 
competent teacher, without feeling any parti- 
cular interest in the temperaments of his 
pupils, except in so far as they react upon 
the work to be done. But a woman can 
hardly take this impersonal attitude; and 
this makes women both more and less 
effective, because human beings invariably 
prefer to be dealt with dispassionately; and 
this is as a rule more difficult for women ; and 
thus in a complicated matter affecting con- 
duct, a woman as a rule forms a sounder 
judgment on what has actually occurred than 
a man, and is perhaps more likely to take a 
severe view. The attitude of a Galileo is 
often a useful one for a teacher, because boys 
and girls ought in matters that concern them- 
selves to learn how to govern themselves. 

Thus in situations involving relation with 
others women are more liable to feel anxiety 
is 



226 Where No Fear Was 

and the pressure of personal responsibility; 
and the question is to what extent this ought 
to be indulged, in what degree men and 
women ought to assume the direction of 
other lives, and whether it is wholesome for 
the director to allow a desire for personal 
dominance to be substituted for more spon- 
taneous motives. 

It very often happens that the tempera- 
ments which most claim help and support 
are actuated by the egotistical desire to find 
themselves interesting to others, while those 
who willingly assume the direction of other 
lives are attracted more by the sense of power 
than by genuine sympathy. 

But it is clear that it is in the region of our 
affections that the greatest risks of all have to 
be run. By loving, we render ourselves 
liable to the darkest and heaviest fears. 
Yet here, I believe, we ought to have no 
doubt at all; and the man who says to him- 
self, " I should like to bestow my affection on 
this person and on that, but I will keep it in 
restraint, because I am afraid of the suffering 



Affection 227 

which it may entail, " — such a man, I say, is 
very far from the kingdom of God. Because 
love is the one quality which, if it reaches a 
certain height, can altogether despise and 
triumph over fear. When ambition and 
delight and energy fail, love can accompany 
us, with hope and confidence, to the dark 
gate ; and thus it is the one thing about which 
we can hardly be mistaken. If love does not 
survive death, then life is built upon nothing- 
ness, and we may be glad to get away ; but it 
is more likely that it is the only thing that 
does survive. 



XIX 

SIN 

It is every one's duty to take himself seri- 
ously — that is the right mean between taking 
oneself either solemnly or apologetically. 
There is no merit in being apologetic about 
oneself. One has a right to be there, where- 
ever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to 
take some kind of a hand in whatever is going 
on; natural tact is the only thing which can 
tell us exactly how far those rights extend; 
but it is inconvenient to be apologetic, 
because if one insists on explaining how one 
comes to be there, or how one comes to have 
an opinion, other people begin to think that 
one needs explanation and excuse; but it is 
even worse to be solemn about oneself, 
because English people are very critical in 

private; though they are tolerant in public, 

228 



Sin 229 

because they dislike a scene, and have not got 
the art of administering the delicate snub, 
which indicates to a man that his self-confi- 
dence is exuberant, without humiliating him ; 
when English people inflict a snub, they do it 
violently and emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, 
and it generally means that they are reliev- 
ing themselves of accumulated disapproval. 
An Englishman is apt to be deferential, and 
one of the worst temptations of official life is 
the temptation to be solemn. There is an 
old story about Scott and Wordsworth, when 
the latter stayed at Abbot sf or d; Scott, during 
the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and 
courteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; 
and one of the guests present records how 
at the end of the visit not a single word had 
ever passed Wordsworth's lips which could 
have indicated that he knew his host to have 
ever written a line of poetry or prose. I was 
sitting the other day at a function next a man 
of some eminence, and I was really amazed 
at the way in which he discoursed of him- 
self and his habits, his diet, his hours of 



230 Where No Fear Was 

work, and the blank indifference with which 
he received similar confidences. He merely 
waited till the speaker had finished, and then 
resumed his own story. 

It is this sort of solemn egotism which 
makes us overvalue our anxieties quite out of 
all proportion to their importance, because 
they all appear to us as integral elements of a 
dignified drama in which we enact the hero's 
part. We press far too heavily on the sense 
of responsibility; and if we begin by telling 
boys, as is too often done in sermons, that 
whatever they do or say is of far-reaching 
consequence, that every lightest word may 
produce an effect, that any carelessness of 
speech or example may have disastrous 
effects upon the character of another, we are 
doing our best to encourage the self-emphasis 
which is the very essence of priggishness. 

There is a curious conflict going on at the 
present time in English life between light- 
mindedness and solemnity; there is a great 
appetite for living, a love of amusement, a 
tendency to subordinate the interests of the 



Sin 231 

future to the pleasure of the moment, and to 
think that the one serious evil is boredom; 
that is a healthy manifestation enough in its 
way, because it stands for interest and delight 
in life; but there is another strain in our 
nature, that of a rather heavy pietism, in- 
herited from our Puritan ancestors. It must 
not be forgotten that the Puritan got a good 
deal of interest out of his sense of sin ; as the 
old combative elements of feudal ages dis- 
appeared, the soldierly blood retained the 
fighting instinct, and turned it into moral 
regions. The sense of adventure is impelled 
to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's Progress is 
a clear enough proof that the old combative- 
ness was all there, revelling in danger, and 
exulting in the thought that the human being 
was in the midst of foes. Sin represented 
itself to the Puritan as a thing out of which 
he could get a good deal of fun, not the fun of 
yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his 
sword and getting in some shrewd blows. 
When preachers nowadays lament that we 
have lost the sense of sin, what they really 



232 Where No Fear Was 

mean is that we have lost our combativeness : 
we no longer believe that we must treat our 
foes with open and brutal violence, and we 
perceive that such conduct is only pitting one 
sin against another. There is no warrant in 
the Gospel for the combative idea of the 
Christian life; all such metaphors and sug- 
gestions come from St. Paul and the Apo- 
calypse. The fact is that the world was 
not ready for the utter peaceableness of the 
Gospel, and it had to be accommodated to the 
violence of the world. 

Now again the Christian idea is coloured 
by scientific and medical knowledge, and sin, 
instead of an enemy which we must fight, has 
become a disease which we must try to cure. 

Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are 
not as a rule instincts which are evil in them- 
selves, so much as instincts which are selfishly 
pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in 
its essence the selfishness which will not 
co-operate, and which secures advantages 
unjustly, without any heed to the disadvan- 
tage of others. Sympathetic imagination is 



Sin 233 

the real foe of sin, the power of putting one- 
self in the place of another; and much of the 
sentiment which is so prevalent nowadays is 
the evidence of the growth of sympathy. 

The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible 
dilemma, because it implies a treacherous 
enmity on the part of God, to create man 
weak and unstable, and to put his weakness 
against tyrannous desires ; to allow his will to 
do evil to be stronger than his power to do 
right, is a satanical device. One must not 
sacrifice the truth to the desire for simplicity 
and effective statement. The truth is intri- 
cate and obscure, and to pretend that it is 
plain and obvious is mere hypocrisy. The 
strength of Calvinism is its horrible resem- 
blance to a natural inference from the facts of 
life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true, then 
it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say 
that God is loving or just. The real basis 
for all deep-seated fear about life is the 
fear that one will not be dealt with either 
lovingly or justly. But we have to make a 
simple choice as to what we will believe, and 



234 Where No Fear Was 

the only hope is to believe that immediate 
harshness and injustice is not ultimately 
inconsistent with Love. No one who knows 
anything of the world and of life can pretend 
to think or say that suffering always results 
from, or is at all proportioned to, moral faults ; 
and if we are tempted to regard all our dis- 
asters as penal consequences, then we are 
tempted to endure them with gloomy and 
morbid immobility. 

It is far more wholesome and encouraging 
to look upon many disasters that befall us as 
opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke 
the courage which does not come by indolent 
prosperity, to increase our sympathy, to 
enlarge our experience, to make things clearer 
to us, to develop our mind and heart, to free 
us from material temptations. Past suffering 
is not always an evil, it is often an exciting 
reminiscence. It is good to take life adven- 
turously, like Odysseus of old. What would 
one feel about Odysseus if, instead of con- 
triving a way out of the Cyclops' cave, he 
had set himself to consider of what forgotten 



Sin 235 

sin his danger was the consequence? Suffer- 
ing and disaster come to us to develop our 
inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt 
and dismay us; and we ought therefore to 
approach experience with a sense of humour, 
if possible, and with a lively curiosity. I 
recollect hearing a man the other day de- 
scribing an operation to which he had been 
subjected. "My word," he said, his eyes 
sparkling with delight at the recollection, 
"that was awful, when I came into the oper- 
ating-room, and saw the surgeons in their 
togs, and the pails and basins all about, and 
was invited to step up to the table!" There 
is nothing so agreeable as the remembrance of 
fears through which we have passed; and we 
can only learn to despise them by finding out 
how unbalanced they were. 

I do not mean that fears can ever be pleas- 
ant at the time, but we do them too much 
honour if we court them and defer to them. 
However much we may be tortured by them, 
there is always something at the back of our 
mind which despises our own susceptibility 



236 Where No Fear Was 

to them; and it is that deeper instinct which 
we ought to trust. 

But we cannot even begin to trust it, as 
long as we allow ourselves to believe pietisti- 
cally that the Mind of God is set on punish- 
ment. That is the ghastly error which 
humanity tends to make. It has been dinned 
into us, alas, from our early years, and 
religious phraseology is constantly polluted 
by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to 
this at all ; He spoke perfectly plainly against 
the theory of " judgments. " Of course 
suffering is sometimes a consequence of sin, 
but it is not a vindictive punishment; it is 
that we may learn our mistake. But we 
must give up the revengeful idea of God: 
that is imported into our scale of values by 
the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the 
weak man, who fears that his safety will be 
menaced if he does not make an example, 
deals in revenge. He is indignant at any- 
thing which mortifies his vanity, which 
implies any doubt of his power or any dis- 
regard of his wishes. Revenge is born of 



Sin 237 

terror, and to think of God as vindictive is 
to think of Him as subject to fear. Serene 
and unquestioned strength can have nothing 
to do with fear. Milton is largely respon- 
sible for perpetuating this belief. He makes 
the Almighty say to the Son, 

Let us advise, and to this hazard draw 
With speed what force is left, and all employ 
In our defence, lest unawares we lose 
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill. 

Milton's idea of the Almighty was frankly 
that of a Power who had undertaken 
more than he could manage, and who had 
allowed things to go too far. But it is a 
puerile conception of God; and to allow 
ourselves to think or speak of God as a 
Power that has to take precautions, or 
that has anything to fear from the ex- 
ercise of human volition, is to cloud the 
whole horizon at once. 

But we ought rather to think of God as a 
Power which for some reason works through 
imperfection. The battle of the world is that 



238 Where No Fear Was 

of force against inertness: and our fears are 
the shadow of that combat. 

Fear should then rather show us that we 
are being confronted with experience; and 
that our duty is to disregard it, to march 
forward through it, to come out on the other 
side of it. It is all an adventure, in fact ! The 
disaster in which we are involved is not sent 
to show us that the Eternal Power which 
created us is vexed at our failures, or bent on 
crushing us. It is exactly the opposite; it is 
to show us that we are worth testing, worth 
developing, and that we are to have the 
glory of going on; the very fear of death is 
the last test of our belief in Love. We are 
assuredly meant to believe that the coward 
is to learn the beauty of courage, that the 
laggard is to perceive the worth of energy, 
that the selfish man is to be taught sympathy. 
If we must take a metaphor, let us rather 
think of God as the graver of the gem than 
as the child that beats her doll for collapsing 
instead of sitting upright. 

It is our dishonouring thought of God as 



Sin 239 

jealous, suspicious, fond of exhibiting power, 
revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We 
must rather think of His Heart as full of 
courage, energy, and hope; as teeming with 
joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can 
begin to think of failures, fears, delays as 
things small and unimportant, not as mali- 
cious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as 
obstacles to reveal and to develop our 
strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the 
world so great as the joy of finding ourselves 
stronger than we know ; and that is what God 
is bent upon showing us, and not upon prov- 
ing to us that we are vile and base, in the 
spirit of the old Calvinist who said to his own 
daughter when she was dying of a painful 
disease, that she must remember that all 
short of Hell was mercy. It is so ; but Hell is 
rather what we start from, and out of which 
we have to find our way, than the waste-paper 
basket of life, the last receptacle for our 
shattered purposes. 



XX 

SERENITY 

To achieve serenity we must have the power 

of keeping our hearts and minds fixed upon 

something which is beyond and above the 

passing incidents of life, which so disconcert 

and overshadow us, and which are after all 

but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great 

ocean. Think with what smiling indifference 

a man would meet indignation and abuse and 

menace, if he were aware that an hour hence 

he would be triumphantly vindicated and 

applauded. How calmly would a man sleep 

in a condemned cell if he knew that a free 

pardon were on its way to him! Of course 

the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so 

much the more we are affected by little 

incidents, beyond which we can hardly look 

when they bring us so much pleasure or so 

240 



Serenity 241 

much discomfort; and thus it is always the 
men and women of keen and highly-strung 
natures, who taste the quality of every 
moment, in its sweetness and its bitter- 
ness, who will most feel the influence of fear. 
Edward FitzGerald once sadly confessed that 
as life went on, days of perfect delight — a 
beautiful scene, a melodious music, the 
society of those whom he loved best — brought 
him less and less joy, because he felt that 
they were passing swiftly, and could not be 
recalled. And of course the imaginative 
nature which lives tremulously in delight will 
be most apt to portend sadness in hours 
of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate the 
continuance of sorrow. That is an inevitable 
effect of temperament; but we must not give 
way helplessly to temperament, or allow 
ourselves to drift wherever the mind bears us. 
Just as the skilled sailor can tack up against 
the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a 
contrary breeze to bring him to the haven of 
his desire, so we must be wise in trimming our 
sails to the force of circumstance; while there 



242 Where No Fear Was 

is an eager delight in making adverse condi- 
tions help us to realise our hopes. 

The timid soul that loves delight is apt to 
say to itself, "I am happy now in health and 
circumstances and friends, but I lean out into 
the future, and see that health must fail and 
friends must drift away; death must part 
me from those I love; and beyond all this, I 
see the cloudy gate through which I must 
myself pass, and I do not know what lies 
beyond it." That is true enough! It is 
like the story of the old prince, as told by 
Herodotus, who said in his sorrowful age 
that the gods gave man only a taste of life, 
just enough to let him feel that life was 
sweet, and then took the cup from his lips. 
But if we look fairly at life, at our own life, 
at other lives, we see that pleasure and con- 
tentment, even if we hardly realised that 
it was contentment at the time, have largely 
predominated over pain and unhappiness; a 
man must be very rueful and melancholy 
before he will deliberately say that life has 
not been worth living, though I suppose that 



Serenity 243 

there have probably been hours in the lives 
of all of us when we have thought and 
said and even believed that we would 
rather not have lived at all than suffer so. 
Neither must we pass over the fact that 
every day there are men and women who, 
under the pressure of calamity and dismay, 
bring their lives to a voluntary end. 

But we have to be very dull and thankless 
and slow of heart not to feel that by being 
allowed to live, for however short a time, we 
have been allowed to take part in a very 
beautiful and wonderful thing. The loveli- 
ness of earth, its colours, its lights, its scents, its 
savours, the pleasures of activity and health, 
the sharp joys of love and friendship, these 
are surely very great and marvellous experi- 
ences, and the Mind which planned them 
must be full of high purpose, eager intention, 
infinite goodwill. And we may go further 
than that, and see that even our sorrows and 
failures have often brought something great 
to our view, something which we feel we have 
learned and apprehended, something which 



244 Where No Fear Was 

we would not have missed, and which we 
cannot do without. If we will frankly 
recognise all this, we cannot feebly crumple 
up at the smallest touch of misery, and say 
suspiciously and vindictively that we wish 
we had never opened our eyes upon the world ; 
and even if we do say that, even if we aban- 
don ourselves to despair, we yet cannot hope 
to escape; we did not enter life by our own 
will, it is not our own prudence that has kept 
us there, and even if we end it voluntarily, as 
Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot, 
for an instant, be sure that we are ending it ; 
every inference in the world, in fact, would 
tend to indicate that we do not end it. We 
cannot destroy matter, we can only disperse 
and rearrange it ; we cannot generate a single 
force, we can only summon it from elsewhere, 
and concentrate it, as we concentrate elec- 
tricity, at a single glowing point. Force 
seems as indestructible as matter, and there 
is no reason to think that life is destructible 
either. So that if we are to resign ourselves 
to any belief at all, it must be to the belief 



Serenity 245 

that " to be, or not to be " is not a thing which 
is in our power at all. We may extinguish 
life, as we put out a light; but we do not 
destroy it, we only rearrange it. 

And we can thus at least practise and exer- 
cise ourselves in the belief that we cannot 
bring our experiences to an end, however 
petulantly and irritably we desire to do so, 
because it simply is not in our power to 
effect it. We talk about the power of the 
will, but no effort of will can obliterate the 
life that we have lived, or add a cubit to our 
stature; we cannot abrogate any law of 
nature, or destroy a single atom of matter. 
What it seems that we can do with the will 
is to make a certain choice, to select a certain 
line, to combine existing forces, to use 
them within very small limits. We can 
oblige ourselves to take a certain course, 
when every other inclination is reluctant to 
do it; and even so the power varies in differ- 
ent people. It is useless then to depend 
blindly upon the will, because we may 
suddenly come to the end of it, as we may 



246 Where No Fear Was 

come to the end of our physical forces. 
But what the will can do is to try certain 
experiments, and the one province where its 
function seems to be clear, is where it can 
discover that we have often a reserve or 
unsuspected strength, and more courage and 
power than we had supposed. We can 
certainly oppose it to bodily inclinations, 
whether they be seductions of sense or 
temptations of weariness. And in this one 
respect the will can give us, if not serenity, 
at least a greater serenity than we expect. 
We can use the will to endure, to wait, to 
suspend a hasty judgment; and impulse is 
the thing which menaces our serenity most 
of all. The will indeed seems to be like a 
little weight which we can throw into either 
scale. If we have no doubt how we ought 
to act, we can use the will to enforce our 
judgment, whether it is a question of acting 
or of abstaining; if we are in doubt how to 
act, we can use our will to enforce a wise 
delay. 
The truth then about the will is that it is a 



Serenity 247 

force which we cannot measure, and that it 
is as unreasonable to say that it does not 
exist as to say that it is unlimited. It is 
foolish to describe it as free; it is no more 
free than a prisoner in a cell is free, but yet 
he has a certain power to move about within 
his cell, and to choose among possible employ- 
ments. 

Anyone who will deliberately test his will, 
will find that it is stronger than he suspects; 
what often weakens our use of it is that we 
are so apt to look beyond the immediate 
difficulty into a long perspective of imagined 
obstacles, and to say within ourselves, "Yes, 
I may perhaps achieve this immediate step, 
but I cannot take step after step — my cour- 
age will fail!" Yet if one does make the im- 
mediate effort, it is common to find the whole 
range of obstacles modified by the single 
act; and thus the first step towards the 
attainment of serenity of life is to practise 
cutting off the vista of possible contingencies 
from our view, and to create a habit of deal- 
ing with a case as it occurs. 



248 Where No Fear Was 

I am often tempted myself to send my 
anxious mind far ahead in vague dismay; at 
the beginning of a week crammed with vari- 
ous engagements, numerous tasks, constant 
labour, little businesses, many of them with 
their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say 
that there is no time to do anything that one 
wants to do and to feel that the matters 
themselves will be handled amiss and bun- 
gled. But if one can only keep the mind 
off, or distract it by work, or beguile it by a 
book, a walk, a talk, how easily the thread 
spins off the reel, how quietly one comes to 
harbour on the Saturday evening, with every- 
thing done and finished! 

Again, I am personally much disposed to 
dread the opposition and the displeasure of 
colleagues, and to shrink nervously from any- 
thing which involves dealing with a number of 
people. I ought to have found out before now 
how futile such dread is; other people forget 
their vexation and even grow ashamed of 
it, much as one does oneself; and looking 
back I can recall no crisis which turned 



Serenity 249 

out either as intricate or as difficult as one 
expected. 

Let me admit that I have more than once 
in life made grave mistakes through this 
timidity and indolence, or through an imagin- 
ativeness which could see in a great oppor- 
tunity nothing but a sea of troubles, which 
would, I do not doubt, have melted away as 
one advanced. But no one has suffered 
except myself! Institutions do not depend 
upon individuals ; and I regard such failures 
now just as the petulant casting away of a 
chance of experience, as a lesson which I 
would not learn ; but there is nothing irrepar- 
able about it; one only comes, more slowly 
and painfully, to the same goal at last. I 
dare not say that I regret it all, for we are all 
of us, whether small or great, being taught a 
mighty truth, whether we wish it or know it ; 
and all that we can do to hasten it is to put 
our will into the right scale. I do not think 
mistakes and failures ought to trouble one 
much; at all events there is no fear mingled 
with them. But I do not here claim to have 



250 Where No Fear Was 

attained any real serenity — my own heart is 
too impatient, too fond of pleasure for that ! — 
yet I can see clearly enough that it is there, 
if I could but grasp it; and I know well 
enough how it is to be attained, by being 
content to wait, and by realising at every 
instant and moment of life that, in spite of my 
tremors and indolences, my sharp impa- 
tiences, my petulant disgusts, something very 
real and great is being shown me, which I 
shall at last, however dimly, perceive; and 
that even so the goal of the journey is far 
behind any horizon that I can conceive, and 
built up like the celestial city out of unutter- 
able brightness and clearness, upon a founda- 
tion of peace and joy. 

It is very difficult to determine, by any 
exercise of the intellect or imagination, what 
fears would remain to us if we were freed 
from the dominion of the body. All material 
fears and anxieties would come to an end ; we 
should no longer have any poverty to dread, 
or any of the limitations or circumscriptions 
which the lack of the means of life inflicts 



Serenity 251 

upon us; we should have no ambitions left, 
because the ambitions which centre on 
influence — that is, upon the desire to direct 
and control the interests of a nation or a 
group of individuals — have no meaning 
apart from the material framework of civil 
life. The only kind of influence which would 
survive would be the influence of emotion, 
the direct appeal which one who lives a higher 
and more beautiful life can make to all 
unsatisfied souls, who would fain find the way 
to a greater serenity of mood. Even upon 
earth we can see a faint foreshadowing of 
this in the fact that the only personalities 
who continue to hold the devotion and 
admiration of humanity are the idealists. 
Men and women do not make pilgrimages to 
the graves and houses of eminent jurists and 
bankers, political economists or statisticians: 
these have done their work, and have had 
their reward. Even the monuments of 
statesmen and conquerors have little power 
to touch the imagination, unless some love 
for humanity, some desire to uplift and bene- 



252 Where No Fear Was 

fit the race, have entered into their schemes 
and policies. No, it is rather the soil which 
covers the bones of dreamers and visionaries 
that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists 
and musicians, those who have seen through 
life to beauty, and have lived and suffered 
that they might inspire and tranquillise 
human hearts. The princes of the earth, 
popes and emperors, lie in pompous sepul- 
chres, and the thoughts of those who regard 
them, as they stand in metal or marble, dwell 
most on the vanity of earthly glory. But 
at the tombs of men like Vergil and Dante, 
of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human 
heart still trembles with tears, and hates 
the death that parts soul from soul. So 
that if, like Dante, we could enter the shadow- 
land, and hold converse with the spirits of the 
dead, we should seek out to consort with, not 
those who have subdued and wasted the 
earth, or have terrified men into obedience 
and service, but those whose hearts were 
touched by dreams of impossible beauty, 
and who have taught us to be kind and 



Serenity 253 

compassionate and tender-hearted, to love 
God and our neighbour, and to detect, how- 
ever faintly, the hope of peace and joy which 
binds us all together. 

And thus if emotion, by which I mean the 
power of loving, is the one thing which sur- 
vives, the fears which may remain will be 
concerned with all the thoughts which cloud 
love, the anger and suspicion that divide us; 
so that perhaps the only fears which will 
survive at all will be the fears of our own 
selfishness and coldness, that inner hardness 
which has kept us from the love of God and 
isolated us from our neighbour. The pride 
which kept us from admitting that we were 
wrong, the jealousy that made us hate 
those who won the love we could not win, 
the baseness which made us indifferent to the 
discomfort of others if we could but secure 
our own ease, these are the thoughts which 
may still have the power to torture us; and 
the hell that we may have to fear may be 
the hell of conscious weakness and the horror 
of retrospect, when we recollect how under 



254 Where No Fear Was 

these dark skies of earth we went on our way- 
claiming and taking all that we could get, and 
disregarding love for fear of being taken 
advantage of. One of the grievous fears of 
life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really 
are, in all our baseness and pettiness; yet 
that will assuredly be shown us in no vindic- 
tive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and 
soar. 

There is no hope that death will work an 
immediate moral change in us; it may set us 
free from some sensual and material tempta- 
tions, but the innermost motives will indeed 
survive, that instinct which makes us again 
and again pursue what we know to be false 
and unsatisfying. 

The more that we shrink from self-know- 
ledge, the more excuses that we make for our- 
selves, the more that we tend to attribute our 
failures to our circumstances and to the action 
of others, the more reason we have to fear the 
revelation of death. And the only way to 
face that is to keep our minds open to any 
light, to nurture and encourage the wish to be 



Serenity 255 

different, to pray hour by hour that at any 
cost we may be taught the truth ; it is useless 
to search for happy illusions, to look for short 
cuts, to hope vaguely that strength and vir- 
tue will burst out like a fountain beside our 
path. We have a long and toilsome way to 
travel, and we can by no device abbreviate it ; 
but when we suffer and grieve, we are walking 
more swiftly to our goal; and the hours we 
spend in fear, in sending the mind in weari- 
ness along the desolate track, are merely 
wasted, for we can alter nothing so. We use 
life best when we live it eagerly, exulting in 
its fulness and its significance, casting our- 
selves into strong relations with others, 
drinking in beauty, making high music in 
our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in 
the experiences through which we pass, awe 
at the greatness of the vision, at the vastness 
of the design, as it embraces and enfolds our 
weakness. But we are inside it all, an 
integral and indestructible part of it; and 
the shadow of fear falls when we doubt this, 
when we dread being overlooked or dis- 



256 Where No Fear Was 

regarded. No such thing can happen to us; 
our inheritance is absolute and certain, and it 
is fear that keeps us away from it, and the 
fear of fearlessness. For we are contending 
not with God, but with the fear which hides 
Him from our shrinking eyes ; and our prayer 
should be the undaunted prayer of Moses in 
the clefts of the mountain, "I beseech Thee, 
show me Thy Glory !" 



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**An amazing document in spiritual autobiography, valuable for its 
revelation of what a man thinketh, and abounding in golden phrase* 
and sentences of rhythmic beauty, such as Benson's admirers have 
learned to expect from the great Cambridge stylist." — Christian 
Advocate. 



Q. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York London 



By Arthur Christopher Benson 

Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge 

Along the Road 

12°. $1,50 net By mail, $1,60 

Mr. Benson's volume is a kind of jaunt along life's high- 
way, a pleasing stretch of thoughts and sentiments. Many 
a tarrying place is found on the journey for meditation 
and comment on the values of things, or for the recalling 
of some impressive incident connected with the lives of 
great men of the past generation, many of whom were 
personally ioiown to the author. 

Joyous Gard 

12°, $150 net By mail, $1,60 

Joyous Gard was the Castle of Sir Launcelot in the 
Morte d Arthur, into which he retired, in the intervals of 
war and business, for rest and mirth. In the book called 
by this name the author pleads that many men and 
women could make for themselves a stronghold of the 
mind where they could follow according to their desire 
the track of things beautiful, intellectual, and spiritual, 
not from a sense of duty but for recreation and enjoyment, 
as a respite from daily work and trivial cares. 



Watersprings 



IT. $135 net, By mail, $1,45 

A delicately conceived and thought-infused romance, 
the background of which is, for the most part, Cambridge 
University, among the scenes and associations of which the 
author's best years have been spent. 

Where No Fear Was 

12°, $1,50 net By mail, $1,60 

In this book the author turns for the reader many of the 
rich pages of his life. Yet the book is only incidentally 
autobiographical, he having drawn abundantly as well upon 
the great common hoard of experience for the portrayal and 
valuation of those fears, many of them tonic in their effect, 
which in a variety of forms goad man from infancy to old age. 

New York G. P.Putnam's Sons London 



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